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Alms for Jihad 



Giving to charity is incumbent upon every Muslim. Throughout history, 
Muslims have donated to the poor and to charitable endowments set up for 
the purposes of promoting Islam through the construction of mosques, 
schools, and hospitals. In recent years, there has been a dramatic 
proliferation of Islamic charities, many of which were created in the declining 
decades of the twentieth century by the infusion of oil money into the Muslim 
world. While most of these are legitimate, there is now considerable and 
worrying evidence to show that others have more questionable intentions, 
and that funds from such organizations have been diverted to support 
terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda. The authors of this book examine the 
contention through a detailed investigation of the charities involved, their 
financial intermediaries, and the terrorist organizations themselves. What 
they discover is that money from these charities has funded conflicts across 
the world, from the early days in Afghanistan when the mujahideen (Muslim 
warriors) fought the Soviets, to subsequent terrorist activities in Central Asia, 
Southeast Asia, Africa, Palestine, and, most recently, in Europe and the 
United States. This ground-breaking book is the first to piece together, from 
a vast array of sources, the secret and complex financial systems that 
support terror. 

J. MILLARD BURR worked for many years in the Department of State and 
was formerly United States logistics advisor for Operation Lifeline Sudan I. 
He has worked closely with international charities for more than forty years. 

ROBERT O. COLLINS is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of 
California, Santa Barbara. 

They have previously co-authored three books: Requiem for the Sudan: 
War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile (1995), Africa's Thirty Years' 
War: Chad, Libya, and the Sudan. 1963-1993 (1999), and Revolutionary 
Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000 (2003). 



Alms for Jihad 

Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World 



J. Millard Burr 



Robert 0. Collins 




CAMBRIDGE 

UNIVERSITY PRESS 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo 

Cambridge University Press 

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York 

www.cambridae.org 

Information on this title: www.cambridae.org/9780521857307 

© J. Millard Burr and Robert 0. Collins 2006 

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception 
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, 
no reproduction of any part may take place without 
the written permission of Cambridge University Press 

First published in print format 2006 

ISBN-13 978-0-511-24741-5 mobipocket 
ISBN-10 0-511-24741-9 mobipocket 
ISBN-13 978-0-521-85730-7 hardback 
ISBN-10 0-521-85730-9 hardback 

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of 
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and 
does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or 
appropriate. 



Contents 



List of illustrations 
List of tables 
Preface 

List of abbreviations 
Introduction 

1 The third pillar of Islam: zakat 
Charitable recipients 

Zakat in history 

Zakat. the Egyptian experience 
Zakat in the Sudan 
Sadaga 
Wagf 

Saudi Arabia and Islamic education 

2 Saudi Arabia and its Islamic charities 
Charities and charitable donations in Saudi Arabia 
Saudi Arabia Red Crescent Society 

Muslim World League 

International Islamic Relief Organization 

Al Haramain Islamic Foundation 

World Assembly of Muslim Youth 

Al Wafa Humanitarian Foundation 

Benevolence International Foundation 

Riyadh bombings and Saudi Arabian charities 

3 The banks 
Golden Chain 
Investigating the banks 
Saudi banking 
Islamic banking 

Al Raihi Banking and Investment Corporation 

National Commercial Bank 

Dallah Al Baraka Group and Bank Al Tagwa 

Hawala system 

Continuing bank scrutiny 

4 Afghanistan beginnings 
Al Qaeda 

Qutb and the Afghans 
Emir of Jihad 

Osama bin Laden and MAK 
Al Kifah 

Ayman al-Zawahiri 

Shavkh Omar Abd al-Rahman 



Peripatetic muiahideen 
Foot-soldiers 

Wael Hamza Julaidan and the Rabita Trust 
Pakistan and the Al Rashid Trust 

5 Islamic charities and the revolutionary Sudan 
Banking in the Sudan 

Enter Osama bin Laden 
Islamic charities and the Sudan 
Revolutionary Sudan 
People's Defense Force 
Turabi's presence 

Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi and Muwafag 
Sudanese charities in Somalia 
Al Qaeda and Islamic charities in East Africa 
Islamic charities in West Africa 

6 Islam at war in the Balkans 
Afghanistan in Bosnia 

Al Muwafaq Brigade 
Sudanese connections 
Third World Relief Agency 
Aftermath in Bosnia 
Albanian imbroglio 
War in Kosovo 
After 9/1 1 

7 Russia and the Central Asian Crescent 
Outsiders begin to arrive 

Islam in Tajikistan 

Heartland of Central Asia: Uzbekistan 

Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan 

Kyrgyzstan: door to China 

Transcaucasia 

Republic of Georgia 

Chechnya 

Lost opportunity and investigations 

8 From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia 
Moro Islamic Liberation Front 
Muhammad Jamal Khalifa 

Abu Sawaf Group 

Malaysia 

Indonesia 

Revolt in southern Thailand 
Forgotten Bangladesh 
9 The Holy Land 
Palestine Red Crescent Society 



Charities in Palestine 
HAMAS 

HAMAS abroad 
The United States responds 
Arafat's charitable corruption 
Reviving the Intifada 

More charitable support for Palestine and HAMAS 
Lebanon and Hizbullah 
10 The Islamization of Europe 
Muslim Europe 
Germany's problem 
Muslims in Italy 
Islam and France 

Islamic charities. Algerian Islamists, and Palestinians 
The Netherlands. Belgium, and the Danes 
The United Kingdom 
11 Islamic charities in North America 
Investigating charities 
BIF and GRF 
Al Kifah and Al Haramain 
Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development 
Canadian connections 
WISE 

SAAR Foundation 
Epilogue 
12 Conclusion 
Notes 

Select bibliography 
Index 



Illustrations 

Maps 

1 The Peshawar-AI Qaeda nexus 

2 The Khartoum-AI Qaeda nexus 



Figure 

1 



The Peshawar Connection 



Tables 



2.1 The Saudi royal family and its charitable interests 

2 2 Charitable entities belonging to or associated with the Al Qaeda organization 

3.1 The Golden Chain 

4.1 Islamist terrorist organizations 



Preface 



This book seeks to unravel and bring clarity to the complex, elaborate, and secret 
world of Islamic charities that have financed terrorism. It is not an attempt to give the 
kind of learned discourse on zakat, sadaqa, or viaqf that can be found in the 
Encyclopaedia of Islam. Similarly, it cannot provide an extensive analysis of each of the 
regions where Islamic charities have supported terrorists. Thus, the individual chapters 
are more an abstract, a precis, to provide a succinct explanation of the composition, 
financing, money-laundering, and management of those charities through which runs 
their common objective, the establishment of the Islamist state. It must be abundantly 
clear from the outset that there are thousands of Islamic charities to assist and support 
the poor, the destitute, the sick, and the refugee that have nothing to do with terrorism. 
Many of these charities promote Islam for its religious mission, but that is not what this 
book is about. Our objective was to have the reader, when reaching the last page, have 
an appreciation for the global extent, ferocity, and determination of the Islamists who are 
perpetrating crimes against humanity in the name of religion, and the role that certain 
Islamic charities have played in supporting those Islamists. The rhetoric of revolution to 
justify terror to seize political power has become a masquerade that denigrates the very 
spiritual meaning and power of Islam. 

Although the authors have had to struggle to select the critical evidence from our many 
sources to satisfy the practical constraints of publication, the genesis of this book began 
during the writing of Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 
1989-2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For those familiar with Khartoum, one of the most 
striking differences between the city in the 1980s and in the 1990s was the appearance 
of new Islamic charities and their gratuitous proliferation in prominently situated offices. 
Who were these charities? What was their purpose? Why the Sudan of all places? The 
more we sought the answers to this phenomenon, the more we realized that Khartoum 
had actually been transformed from a rather somnolent outpost of the Islamic world into 
a center of the international Islamist movement, made possible by the enormous 
amounts of money made available to its leaders by Islamic charities. The search was on 
before the trail turned cold. 

The authors owe a debt of gratitude to Olivier Roy and Steven Emerson, investigators 
whose lone voices were heard in the early 1990s warning governments that an Islamist 
revolutionary movement was germinating throughout the western world. Emerson 
distributed a video to convince those who would look and listen that the Islamists had 
established in the USA "an elaborate support and recruiting network coast to coast with 
branches in more than 88 American cities." They served as recruiting centers that 
supported mujahideen operating around the world. Despite the World Trade Center 
bombing in 1993, the Khobar bombing of the US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 
1996, and the substantial evidence afterward that Islamist warriors had declared war on 
the USA and now Europe, Emerson was seen as an alarmist, perhaps because of his 
well-known Israeli bias. Even though certain intelligence officers understood the dangers 
of jihad in the USA, the authors determined as early as 1993 that the FBI was extremely 
cautious in its investigation of Islamic charities. 

A second debt of gratitude is owed Rita Katz, the "anonymous" author of Terrorist 
Hunter, the story of one woman's struggle to expose the activities of seditious operators 



within Islamic charities functioning in the USA. Like Emerson, she was a vox clamantis 
in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, for the abundant evidence she uncovered 
during a decade of determined investigation. Her book is essential to an understanding 
of how Islamic charities supported Islamist movements in the USA, but it has been 
largely ignored by Washington. 

We especially want to thank once again Alan Goulty for reading, as he had done for 
Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State, 1989-2000, the early 
chapters of Alms for Jihad before leaving the UK for demanding diplomatic duties as Her 
Majesty's Ambassador to Tunisia. We also want to express our appreciation to Steve 
Humphreys, Professor of History at the University of California Santa Barbara, for his 
unflagging support in all matters Arabic, and to Sylvia Curtis, the intrepid research 
librarian at UCSB, who has always come to our rescue. 

Spellings can be a curse that can result in chaos, particularly when the documentation 
for a book, like this one, comes in many languages. Motivated by familiarity, practice, or 
ethnic pride, Africans, Arabs, Asians, and Europeans have spelled the name of a 
person, place, or event in a transliteration that reflects their own parochialism, 
patriotism, and panache. The result is often confusion rather than clarity. The only 
legitimate principle is consistency of spelling in the text. Consistency, however, is not a 
universal virtue and does not always guarantee clarity. In the search for clarity, we have 
consequently Anglicized or given the English equivalent for people, place-names, and 
events recorded in different languages. Place-names are spelled for understanding 
rather than in the local patois. Personal names are more precisely retained because 
they are complex, for everyone spells his or her name to their satisfaction and not by 
standardized rules of transliteration. As with place-names, variety can produce 
bewilderment in 7the reader that can best be resolved by consistency. We have 
abstained from the use of diacritical marks in transliteration wherever possible, retaining 
them only for a very few Arabic words (e.g. Shari'a) and avoiding them when possible in 
personal names. Currency is expressed in US dollars. This is not academic arrogance. 
It is a practical response for those who wish to understand what we have written. 

If spellings are a curse, acronyms are a necessary evil. Virtually every government 
agency, and certainly most Islamic charities, have very long names. It would be 
stylistically cumbersome to repeat this lengthy nomenclature at every entry. Although 
there are 206 acronyms on the list, many are rarely used in the text while others, 
because of their frequency, become instantly recognizable to the reader. When the 
name of the organization is first presented, the acronym is placed in parenthesis, e.g. 
Islamic Countries Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (ICESCO). In a few 
instances where the acronym appears in a later chapter we refresh the reader's 
memory by repeating the full name of the organization, but those are few. 

J. Millard Bun- 
Rio Rico, Arizona 



Robert 0. Collins 
Santa Barbara, California 



Abbreviations 

AAIF Al Aqsa International Foundation (Yemen) 

ADF Allied Democratic Forces (Uganda) 

AEL Arab-European League (Belgium) 

AFP Agence France Press 

AFP Armed Forces of the Philippines 

AGI Agenzia Italia 

AHIF Al Haramain Islamic Foundation (Mu'Assasat al-Haramayn al- Khayriya) 
(Saudi Arabia) 

AIAI Al Itihad al-lslamiyya (Somalia) 

AID Agency for International Development (USA) 

AIP Azerbaijan Islamic Party 

AIU African International University 

AIVD General Intelligence and Security Service (Algemene Inlichtingen-en 
Veiligheidsdienst, the former BVD) (the Netherlands) 

AM The Emigrants (Al Muhajiroun) (UK) 

AP Associated Press (USA) 

APEC Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation 

ARMM Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindinao (Philippines) 

ASP Association de Secours Palestinien (Switzerland) 

ATF Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (USA) 

ATM automated teller machine 

BADEA Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (Sudan) 

BCCI Bank of Credit and Commerce International (Abu Dhabi) 

BfV Office of the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt fur 
Verfassungsschutz) (Germany) 

BIC Benevolent International Corporation (Saudi Arabia, Philippines) (see also 
BIF) 

BIDC Al Baraka Investment and Development Corporation (Saudi Arabia) 

BIF Benevolence International Foundation (in Russia BIF was called Benevolence 
International Corporation, BIC) 

BIF Benevolence International Foundation (Saudi Arabia) 

BND German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) 

BNP Bangladesh National Party 

BVD National Intelligence and Security Agency (Binnelandse Veiligheidsdienst) 
(the Netherlands) 



BYL Bangsamoro Youth League (Philippines) 

CAIR Council of American-Islamic Relations (USA) 

CARE Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere 

CBSP Comite de Bienfaisance et Secours aux Palestiniens (France) 

CEO chief executive officer 

CFCM Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman (France) 

CIA Central Intelligence Agency (USA) 

CIDA Canadian International Development Agency 

CIPF Council for International People's Friendship (Sudan) 

CIS Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union) 

CORIF Conseil de Reflexion sur I'lslam de France 

CSIS Canadian Security Intelligence Service 

CSSW Charitable Society for Social Welfare (USA) 

DMI Dal al-Mal al-lslami Investment Corporation (Saudi Arabia) 

DUP Democratic Unionist Party (Sudan) 

EIJ Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Jama'at al-lslamiyya) 

EU European Union 

FATF Financial Action Task Force (OECD, Paris) 

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation (USA) 

FBIS Foreign Broadcast Information Service (USA) 

FIS Islamic Salvation Front (Algeria) 

FISA Foreign Intelligence Service Act (USA) 

FIU Financial Intelligence Unit (USA) 

FKAWJ Sunni Communication Forum (Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah 
Jama'ah) (Indonesia) 



FLN 


National Liberation Front (Front de Liberation Nationale) (Algeria) 


FOCA 


Friends of Charities Association (USA) 


FSB 


Federal Security Service (Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnost) (Russia) 


FSM 


Fondation Secours Mondial (Belgium) 


FTATC 


Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center (USA) 


GDP 


gross domestic product 


GIA 


Armed Islamic Group (Groupement Islamique Arme) (Algeria) 


GMT 


Greenwich Mean Time (UK) 


GRF 


Global Relief Foundation (Fondation Secours Mondial) (Belgium) 


GSC 


Zionist Action Group (Israel) 



GSISS Graduate School of Islamic Thought and Social Sciences (USA) 

HAI Human Appeals International (UAE) 

HAMAS Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawama al-lslamiyya fi 
Filistin) 

HCI Human Concern International (Canada) 

HLF Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development (Holy Land Foundation) 
(USA, France) 

HUJI Jihad Movement of Bangladesh (Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-lslami) 

HuT Hizb ut-Tahrir al-lslami, international Salafist organization 

IAC Islamic African Center (Sudan) 

IAP Islamic Association for Palestine (USA) 

IARA Islamic African Relief Agency (Sudan, USA) 

IBC Islamic Benevolence Committee (Lajnat al-Birr al-lslamiyya, LBI) 
(Pakistan, Saudi Arabia) 

ICC Islamic Coordinating Council (Pakistan) 

ICESCO Islamic Countries Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization (France) 

ICF Islamic Charter Front (Sudan) 

10 1 1 International Council for Islamic Information (UK) 

ICP Islamic Committee for Palestine 

ICRC International Commission for the Red Cross/Red Crescent 

ICS Islami Chhatra Shibir (Bangladesh) 

IDB Islamic Development Bank (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) 

IDF Israel Defense Force 

IDPs internally displaced persons 

IEEPA International Emergency Economic Powers Act (USA) 

IHH Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom, known as the Humanitarian 
Relief Foundation (International Humanitaire Hilfsorganization) (Turkey) 

1 1 A International Islamic Aid (France) 

MB International Islamic Brigade (Afghanistan, Chechnya) 

IICO International Islamic Charitable Organization (Kuwait, Philippines) 

HIT International Institute for Islamic Thought (USA) 

IIRO International Islamic Relief Organization (Saudi Arabia) 

IJMP Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine (Harakat al-Jihad al-lslami fi Filistin) 

IMA Islamic Movement for Africa (Nigeria) 

IMU Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan 



INS Immigration and Naturalization Service (USA) 

INTERPAL Palestine Relief and Development Fund (UK) 

IPC Islamic Presentation Committee (Philippines) 

IRIC Islamic Research and Information Center (Kuwait, Philippines) 

IRIN Integrated Regional Information Network 

IRNA Islamic Republic News Agency (Iran) 

IRPT Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (Hizb Nahda) 

IRS Internal Revenue Service (USA) 

IRSA Islamic Relief Agency (Sudan) 

IRS-CI Criminal Investigations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (USA) 

ISCAG Islamic Studies for Call and Guidance (Philippines) 

ISI Inter-Service Intelligence Agency (Pakistan) 

ISNA Islamic Society of North America (Canada, USA) 

ISRA Islamic Studies and Research Association (Munazzamat al-Da'wa 
al-lslamiyya) (USA) 

Jl Jammah Islamiyya (Southeast Asia) 

KCC Kurdish Cultural Centre (UK) 

KFOR Kosovo Force 

KLA Kosovo Liberation Army (Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, UCK) 

KMM Kumpulan Mujahideen (Malaysia) 

LBI See IBC 

LDK Democratic League of Kosovo 

LJ Laskar Jihad (Malaysia) 

MAK Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab (Mujahideen Services Bureau) 
(Pakistan) 

MAP Medical Aid for Palestine (Canada, UK) 

MAYA Muslim Arab Youth Association (USA) 

MEMRI Middle East Media Research Institute 

MILF Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Philippines) 

MIRO Mercy International Relief Organization (Saudi Arabia) 

MNLF Moro National Liberation Front (Philippines) 

MSA Muslim Students' Association of the USA and Canada 

MWL Muslim World League (Rabitait al-Alami al-lslamiyya) (Saudi Arabia) 

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization 

NCB National Commercial Bank (Saudi Arabia) 



NCIS National Criminal Intelligence Service (UK) 

NDA National Democratic Alliance (Sudan) 

NGO non-government organization 

NIF National Islamic Front (al-Jabhah al-lslamiyya al-Qawmiyya) (Sudan) 

NMCC National Management Consultancy Center (Saudi Arabia) 

NSC National Security Council (USA) 

NSRCC National Salvation Revolutionary Command Council (often simply RCC) 
(Sudan) 

NSSWO Non-Sudanese Students' Welfare Organization (Sudan) 

NTFIU National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit (UK) 

OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Paris) 

OFAC Office of Foreign Assets Control (USA) 

OIC Organization of the Islamic Conference 

OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries 

OPIC Overseas Private Investment Corporation (USA) 

PA Palestinian Authority 

PAIC Popular Arab and Islamic Congress (Sudan) 

PCAPM Popular Committee for Assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen (Saudi 
Arabia) 

PDF People's Defense Force (Sudan) 

PDPA People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan 

PIJ Palestine Islamic Jihad 

PLO Palestine Liberation Organization 

POW prisoner of war 

PPF People's Police Force (Sudan) 

PRCS Palestine Red Crescent Society 

PULO Pattani United Liberation Organization (Thailand) 

PWA Palestine Welfare Association 

RAFAH Turkish Prosperity Party 

RCC See NSRCC 

RCMP Royal Canadian Mounted Police 

RG Renseignements Generaux (France) 

RISEAP Regional Islamic Dawah Council of Southeast Asia and the Pacific 

RSO Rohingya Solidarity Organization (Bangladesh) 

SAAR Suleiman Abd al-Aziz al-Rajhi Foundation (Saudi Arabia) 



SAMA Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority 

SARCS Saudi Arabia Red Crescent Society 

SAS Special Air Service (UK) 

SAUDIFIN Saudi Finance Corporation 

SCR Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Special Committee for Relief (Saudi Arabia) 

SDA Party of Democratic Action (Bosnia) 

SDGT Specially Designated Global Terrorists (USA) 

SEDCO Saudi Economic and Development Company LLC 

SHCB Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia 

SHIK Albanian Intelligence Services 

SHRC Saudi High Relief Commission 

SIDO Sub-Saharan International Development Organization (Sudan) 

SJRC Saudi Joint Relief Committee (for Bosnia) 

SJRC Saudi Joint Relief Committee for Kosovo and Chechnya (not to be 
confused with SJRC for Bosnia) 

SPLA Sudan People's Liberation Army 

SPLM Sudan People's Liberation Movement 

SSR Society for Social Reform (Kuwait) 

TANJUG official Yugoslavia news agency 

TMC Transitional Military Council (Sudan) 

TWRA Third World Relief Agency (Austria) 

UAE United Arab Emirates 

UASR United Association for Studies and Research (USA) 

UCOII Union of Muslim Organizations of Italy 

UK United Kingdom 

UN United Nations 

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization 

UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees 

UNICEF United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund 

UNITAF United Nations International Task Force (Somalia) 

UNLU Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (Palestine) 

UNMIK United Nations Mission in Kosovo 

UNOSOM I United Nations Operation in Somalia II 

UNOSOM II United Nations Operation in Somalia II 

UNRWA United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Palestine) 



UNSCR 


United Nations Security Council Resolution 


UOIF 


French Union of Islamic Organizations 


UPI 


United Press International (USA) 


USA 


United States of America 


use 


United Somali Congress 


USF 


University of South Florida (USA) 


USSR 


Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 


UTO 


United Tajik Opposition 


WAMY 


World Assembly of Muslim Youth (Saudi Arabia) 


WEFOUND 


Wisdom Enrichment Foundation (Saudi Arabia) 


WHO 


World Health Organization 


WISE 


World and Islamic Studies Enterprise (USA) 



Introduction 



This confirms that the [Prophet's] Companions were correct to brand as apostates 
those who refused to pay the alms tax [zakat], and to kill them and imprison their 
children. God the Most High decreed that unless someone surrenders judgement to 
the Prophet, he cannot be part of the community of the faithful. 

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, December 2002111 



The US Department of State estimates that there are some 6,000 legitimate Islamic 
charities, but that number is surely very conservative. Like hundreds of charities in the 
West, particularly in the USA, many Islamic charities are modest affairs established by 
a wealthy individual or family usually for a specific charitable purpose and held 
accountable only to the founder. In recent years there has been a greater effort by 
Muslim countries to register their charities, but often the record remains incomplete and 
there is frequently no organized means to make registered charities account for what 
they do. Moreover, in the Muslim world there is a deeply ingrained tradition that 
charitable giving is solely the business of the donor and not the state. The thousands of 
charities that are the beneficiaries do indeed receive vast sums of assets and money for 
humanitarian and religious purposes. They are not the subject of this book. Our concern 
is those charities that have been used as fronts to launder money and assets in order to 
finance jihadists who believe that only terror will result in the establishment of the Islamist 
state. 

The number of charities that have supported Islamist jihadists and their terrorist 
activities will never be known, but they were surely a small percentage of the total 
number of Islamic charities worldwide. Those charities proven by 2004 to have belonged 
to or to have been associated with Al Qaeda numbered only fourteen (see table 2.2 ). 
One can reasonably assume, however, that there are other less obtrusive charities that 
have helped Islamists committed to terrorism to achieve their ends, but they would be 
smaller in size and funding than the major charities which are the principal players in 
the following saga. Moreover, charities for terrorism is not a growth industry since 
individual national efforts to register, monitor, and hold charities accountable for their 
activities have been or are being widely adopted by those countries from which most of 
the terrorists and their sources of funds have originated in the past. Saudi Arabia, 
Pakistan, Yemen, and other Muslim states have been and are quietly dismantling many 
of their charities, but in their subsequent silence the causes of closure can only be 
speculative. The reader, however, should be aware of one very important distinction, for 
not all charities are alike: although few in number, the charities that have supported Al 
Qaeda and its offshoots have been among the wealthiest. It is not the number of Islamic 
charities devoted to Islamist and jihadist terrorism, but their size, outreach, and above all 
their wealth that has enabled them to have a significant international impact far out of 
proportion to their numbers, not unlike the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations of the 
West. The critical difference, of course, is the objective to be achieved, and their 
sponsorship of terrorism with the aim of bringing about the Islamist state can by no 
stretch of the imagination be regarded as philanthropic. 



The deft synchronization of the suicide attacks by Muslim terrorists that destroyed the 
World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 astonished the 
citizens of the USA and people throughout the world. All of the terrorists were members 
of Al Qaeda, an international Islamist revolutionary movement of holy warriors 
(mujahideen) founded in Afghanistan in 1988. The leaders of the mujahideen were not 
religious fanatics, but men who, with rare exceptions, had received a western secular 
education that enabled them to use the most complicated weapons and employ the most 
modern instruments of organization, technology, communication, and finance. The 
annual reports on terrorism by the Department of State, and evidence obtained about 
the funding of Al Qaeda during the trial of its members involved in the 1998 bombing of 
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, have clearly demonstrated that 
Islamist terrorist organizations raised funds through a variety of methods often opaque 
and unknown in the West. [21 Some monies were collected through legitimate 
businesses, but much of the funding to support Islamist terrorist organizations has 
come, often unwittingly, directly from individuals and from the stream of donations to 
Muslim charities. Presumably, most donors clearly believed their contributions would 
assist the needy and promote Islam. Some who gave or established their own charities, 
however, were committed to the establishment of Islamist states in the Muslim world as 
well as the conversion of the kafirin (unbelievers), beyond the frontiers of Islam. This 
objective clearly transformed a religious mission into a political cause in which crimes 
against humanity were believed to be instruments necessary to establish the Islamist 
state of true believers. 

During the 1990s there had been a dramatic proliferation of Islamic charities that 
began in the late 1970s and accelerated during the 1980s. As many new ones popped 
up like mushrooms, their presence could no longer be ignored. Most were legitimate, 
some were not. They were presumably friendly with the older established Muslim 
charities, but often they were in competition. In time it became abundantly clear that 
acts of terrorism were being perpetrated by a sophisticated network of Islamist terrorist 
organizations, funded by individual Muslims and Muslim charitable institutions. By the 
new millennium numerous Islamic charitable organizations had come to the attention of 
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), state, and local law-enforcement authorities in 
the USA. Their investigations were painfully time consuming. The complexities of Islamic 
finance and banking were unfamiliar to western officials, and there existed a large 
number of major Islamic charities - more than forty - that were registered in the USA 
and supported Muslim activities overseas. [31 

Although the Islamic establishment condemns terrorism, the more radical Islamists 
have advocated its use in their polemical literature supported by hundreds of Islamic 
legal rulings (Ar., sg. fabva; pi. fatawa) by learned clerics and religious jurists. The 
writings of the Sudanese intellectual Hasan al-Turabi in the 1990s are a contemporary 
example. The son of an Islamic judge (qadi), he was deeply influenced as a student at 
the University of Khartoum by the Muslim Brothers (Jam'iyyat al-lkhwan al-Muslimin), 
often called simply the Ikhwan, who were devoted to the restoration of Islamic law and a 
strict interpretation of the Quran in a secular and corrupt Islamic world. After studying 
law at the London School of Economics and the Sorbonne he returned to the Sudan in 
1965 to become Dean of the Khartoum University Law School and patron of the Islamic 
Charter Front (ICF). In 1985 he founded the National Islamic Front (al-Jabhah 
al-lslamiyya al-Qawmiyya, NIF) to promote his Islamist ideology and its agenda. By the 
1990s he had become one of the recognized intellectual architects of the contemporary 



Islamic revival that spread like wildfire across the Muslim world after the Soviet invasion 
of Afghanistan in 1979. 

After the coup d'etat of 30 June 1989 by Brigadier Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir that 
brought the NIF to power in the Sudan, Turabi was transformed from an Islamist 
intellectual into a prominent leader of the global Islamist movement. He argued that the 
contemporary Islamist movement has evolved through four stages. At first, it was "a 
mere trend, with no defined organizational structure." The second stage entailed the 
cohesion of organization "to represent and promote Islam," specifically the Islamic 
Jihad movement in Egypt and the Al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan. In the third 
stage these inchoate groups coalesced to become a "tangible influence in society." 
Reformist in nature, they sought to achieve the "purification" of Muslim society by 
returning to the original ideals of Islam and are usually known as the Salafi tendency; 
such movements have occurred in many places throughout the Muslim world and at 
many times in the history of Islam such as the Wahhabi (mtnvahhidun) movement in 
Saudi Arabia in the eighteenth century and the Mahdist revolution in Sudan in the 
nineteenth. "The fourth stage comes when the Islamic movement assumes the mantle of 
political leadership of society and takes charge of public policy; an example would be 
the recent Taliban movement in Afghanistan. "[41 

Contemporary Islamist radicals such as Turabi, the Saudi Osama bin Laden, the 
Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Tunisian Rashid al-Gannushi, the Algerian Salafi 
Brigade for Call and Combat, and countless mujahideen regard themselves as Salafist, 
defenders of a tradition over fourteen centuries old to reform (islah) and renew (tajdid) 
Islam to its original purity practiced by the Prophet Muhammad and his followers. Today 
there are Salafist movements seeking to impose the unity of the pristine and puritanical 
Islam of the Prophet (tawhid) in virtually every Muslim country, including Saudi Arabia. 
There a number of so-called Salafist crosscurrents flow today just beneath the surface 
and roil the outwardly calm exterior of the House of Saud which they regard as having 
corrupted the teachings of the great eighteenth-century purifier of Islam and founder of 
the Wahhabi movement, Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1 703-1 792).[5] 

Salafi is derived from the Arabic al-salaf, and is usually coupled as al-salafal-salih, the 
"virtuous forefathers," or companions of the Prophet Muhammad. It literally means 
keeping the faith with the early generation of Muslims renowned for their piety, and the 
Salafists regard themselves as the direct descendants of the "best of people" at the 
founding of Islam. The modern movement was established in the nineteenth century to 
assert the religious and cultural identity of Islam. Its leaders, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani 
(1838-1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), and Rashid Rida (1865-1935), 
attributed the decline of Muslim societies to secular Islam that had abandoned the 
original teachings of the Prophet to adopt western ideas of modernity. Thus, the salafa 
(forefathers, Salafists) sought to restore the greatness of the Islamic world by the 
creation of states ruled by scripture, the Quran and Sunna, and by strict adherence to 
the founders of the four medieval schools of Muslim law, Hanafite, Malikite, Shafi'ite, 
and Hanbalite. Moreover, the Shari'a was reinterpreted following two fundamental 
principles: maslaha (the public interest) and talfiq (patching, the concept that the 
sources of Islamic law can be drawn from any of the four schools and not historically 
just one). Above all, Salafists insisted that Islam was Arab and its language Arabic. 
Although traditional Salafists believed it is not permissible for Muslims to overthrow a 
Muslim government, no matter how cruel, incompetent, or secular, contemporary 
Salafists - the Islamist jihadists - contemptuously reject this belief .[6] 



The more "fundamentalist," the more militant and determined is the Salafi organization 
to recreate an Islam uncorrupted by recent political, economic, and social events. Goals 
are defined by the Quran, the Holy Book of Islam in which are written the words of God 
(Allah, an elision of al-ilah, "the God") as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad between 
610 and 632 CE. The Sunna refers to an ideal pattern of life of the ancestral Arabs 
within the customary Muslim domain according to the sayings and deeds of the Prophet. 
After the death of its most famous exponent, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 819 CE), 
the Sunna of the Prophet (sunnat al-nabi) gained widespread acceptance throughout 
the Muslim world and became the foundation of the Shari'a. Literally the trodden path 
leading to a water hole, Shari'a is God's law transmitted through the Prophet to govern 
the conduct of the individual Muslim in both worldly and religious matters as defined by 
one of the four schools of Islamic law. To the Salafist, Shari'a is paramount and must 
not be confused or corrupted by secular law codes or legalisms adopted from the West. 

Determined to purify Islam, the Salafists vehemently denounce the parochialism of 
Sufism and its corrupt practices. Sufism is usually defined as Islamic mysticism by 
which a Muslim can become closer to Allah by a combination of theosophical 
speculation, devotional zeal, and prescribed rituals learned upon initiation into an 
Islamic order (tahqa). Sufism became widely popular in the Islamic revivalist movements 
of the eighteenth century, but it was regarded by orthodox Muslims as a peripheral and 
even clandestine phenomenon in the Muslim world. The Wahhabis rejected all forms of 
Sufism and persecuted its adherents in their efforts to return to the original path of 
Islam, and the influence of Sufi orders has further declined from the 1930s when 
confronted by modernist movements drawing on Wahhabi teachings and claiming that 
Sufism had become dependent on extra-Islamic sources that encouraged passivity to 
true reform. 

In the Salafist pan-Islamic worldview neutrality is impossible. An unremitting and 
constant struggle (Jihad) is to be waged against its enemies, both secular and religious. 
The Salafists still manage to coexist in a tenuous relationship with certain Muslim 
conservative reformers who seek a return to the pure faith through evolution rather than 
the Salafist revolution by the use of terror. The most prominent of these is the Muslim 
Brotherhood, the Ikhwan, founded in Ismailiyya, Egypt, in 1929 by Shaykh Hasan 
al-Banna (1906-1949). The Muslim Brothers followed the evangelical call to return to the 
fundamentals of Islam (da\va) by a gradual transition to an Islamic state through 
education, persuasion, morality and personal behavior. They have survived internal 
divisions and active repression by the state since 1948. Unlike the Salafists the 
Brotherhood was a mass movement that followed Banna's message of salvation, a 
message that was translated into social action through its extensive organization. 
Banna's ideology lacked the philosophical depth of that of the Salafiyya, but it 
succeeded in mobilizing a mass following more by clever propaganda than obtuse 
theology. Although some Islamists often disagree with the tactics employed by the Salafi 
movements, such as the atrocities inflicted by the Taliban movement in Afghanistan, 
they do not rule out the use of violence to achieve their ends. Historically, the Salafi 
leaders have demonstrated no compunction about using terrorism in the pursuit of their 
Islamist objectives. 

Although the UN has been unable to agree on what constitutes terrorism, the FBI has 
defined it as "the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or 
coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in the furtherance 



of political or social objectives. "[7] The US government remains convinced that there are 
more than a dozen major organizations that follow the Salafi tradition and are 
determined to seize the mantle of political leadership from "unworthy" Muslim rulers in 
some fifty countries. Where the end justifies the means, terrorism will not only be used, 
it will be considered justified in order to achieve the purification of Islam. 

Late twentieth-century movements determined to revive Islam by the book and the 
sword also appealed to its founding principles. These included one of the five pillars of 
Islam, the zakat that inextricably involved the principal custodians and dispensers of this 
tithe, Islamic charities. The linkage between the Islamist movement, terrorism, and the 
role of Islamic charities confronted authorities in the West with a conundrum and not a 
little confusion. Muslim religious charities that supported Islamist organizations 
throughout the world by design, religious obligations, or accident were largely an 
unknown phenomenon to western governments. In Christian countries institutions 
seeking financial support for charitable activities have discreetly segregated the secular 
from the religious, reflecting the historic separation of church and state. Secular 
philanthropy supported non-religious charities such as the United Way, boys' clubs, 
museums, cancer societies, the Red Cross. Those devoted to religious purposes - 
missionary societies, seminaries, church construction, Christian humanitarian 
organizations, and the preservation of indigenous languages to promote the propagation 
of the faith - are separate and discrete from the state. 

In contrast, Islam does not distinguish between church and state. Muslims who are 
obligated to perform zakat and individual donors make no distinction between the 
secular and religious uses to which their donations may be employed. That allows those 
who administer Islamic charities a great deal of latitude as to how the money is spent 
and for what purpose. Moreover, the governors of Islamic charities have often a Muslim 
theological background and are frequently members of the ulama, learned clerics with a 
knowledge of Islam. Historically, these religious scholars were the guardians of religious 
and legal education, the regulation of Islamic society, and the preservation of Islamic 
culture. They formed an elite class who vacillated between close cooperation with and 
fierce independence from the state. They opposed the growing secularism and 
nationalism of Middle Eastern governments during the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries. They directed their influence to Islamist educational and religious institutions 
that found their political manifestations in the Muslim Brotherhood of Sunni Islam in 
Egypt and the triumph of the Shi'a ulama in the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi and the 
establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. This historical trust in theological 
authority had for centuries confirmed the belief that the donation, whether a tithe (zakat) 
or the praiseworthy individual act of giving by wealthy Muslims (sadaqa), would be used 
to support the purposes of Islam without accountability. 

Muslims do tithe, and one of the most convenient ways to fulfill that obligation is by 
giving through Muslim charities whose funds have been one of the most dominant 
aspects of Islamic economics. Billions of dollars are collected annually throughout the 
Muslim world with little demand for administrative transparency, which permits the 
distribution of significant funds without the need to create a large administrative 
infrastructure to decide how, where, and to whom the monies will be spent. Charities, 
mosques, and schools are not pestered as they are in the West by the ubiquitous tax 
collector or internal revenue agent, and Muslim governments throughout the world have 
rarely interfered in the collection of charitable funds. Private and public donors are thus 
assured considerable confidentiality. Moreover, charitable institutions have traditionally 



been granted virtual economic autonomy after the funds have been received and in 
practice are free from government interference. Historically, charitable contributions on 
the local level, rather than government funds, have been responsible for the financing of 
Quranic schools, the elementary kuttab and the madrasa, an Islamic college and center 
for religious and legal studies. The course of instruction in the madrasa was the Quran, 
Arabic, Islamic theology, and the Shari'a. The graduates of the madrasa forged the links 
between the ulama, who were the scholars and teachers of religious education, and the 
ruling government authorities who financially supported them. 

The events of 1 1 September 2001 (hereafter 9/1 1 ) also constituted a dramatic turning 
point in the ambivalent relations between the USA and the Islamic world. At the memorial 
prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, a week after the 
destruction of the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush pledged an 
unrelenting attack on Islamic terrorism, but he carefully called the cabal that produced 
9/11 an aberrant minority within the larger Islamic congregation. The Washington Post 
was less generous and more specific. In an article that appeared shortly after 9/11 it 
quoted a Pakistani "cleric" who claimed that Al Qaeda had "hundreds of well-to-do 
people almost everywhere in the world" eager to give financial contributions, and what 
better institution than an Islamic charity? Certainly, the US government was convinced 
that a portion of the $10 billion that the Saudi leadership showered annually on Islamic 
organizations through the ministry of religious works had found its way into the hands of 
Osama bin Laden. Some recipients were certainly individuals, but most were "various 
international [Muslim] charities" that had "diverted [funds] to terrorism, in some cases 
with the knowledge of contributors. "[81 

In the past Islamic charities in the USA and those established abroad had been 
regarded by the public with benign indifference and by the more skeptical authorities, 
with cautious curiosity. Just as national, state, and local governments were loath to 
probe Christian charities, they had hitherto been reluctant to harass Muslim charitable 
organizations. September 11 dramatically changed that attitude despite the president's 
appeal to respect Islam. The very dearth of information about the activities of Muslim 
charities aroused suspicion, as ignorance usually will do, and spawned a good deal of 
supposition founded more on imagination than understanding. Some regarded Muslim 
charities as an integral part of the new geopolitics, or as some put it, "theopolitics." 
Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 funds and weapons for the 
mujahideen from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) evaporated. However, the 
FBI became increasingly aware in the early years of the 1990s that Islamic relief 
agencies in the USA were sending funds to support Islamist mujahideen operating in 
Algeria, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. After 9/11, the Bureau 
inaugurated a more thorough examination of more than a dozen charities operating in 
North America that were responsible for the legal and extra-legal movement of funds to 
recipients abroad. Indeed, for more than a decade millions of dollars had left the USA 
and Canada in support of "good-will" missions by reputable Muslim charities to assist 
the impoverished and refugees in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza and to Islamist 
terrorist organizations operating throughout the Muslim world. 

A week after 9/11 the Treasury Department, which is responsible for all financial 
matters of the US government, had organized an interagency task force consisting of 
four Treasury agencies - the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the US 
Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigations Unit (IRS-CI), 



and the Secret Service - all of whom ironically had facilities and personnel who were 
destroyed at the World Trade Center. The Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center 
(FTATC) was first located in the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control 
to identify foreign terrorist groups and the people and institutions that supported them, 
and to disrupt and intercept their funding.[9] Thereafter, FTATC would work closely with 
the Department of State and the Attorney General to use the authority granted to them 
by the Presidential Executive Order 13224 to uncover, designate, and direct action 
against charitable institutions linked to the financing of terrorist groups. 

Although the American Islamic community could generally depend on historical 
American sensitivity to religious organizations and a cultural hesitancy by western 
intelligence agents to investigate seemingly legitimate Islamic charities, the creation of 
the Office of Homeland Security nine days after 9/1 1 could not but focus scrutiny on the 
Muslim community. The FTATC task force, FBI, and local law enforcement soon found 
that certain Islamic institutions were operating sophisticated schemes to transfer funds 
to and from the USA, Canada, and Europe behind a wall of secrecy. Language and 
cultural mores complicated efforts to unravel their financial transactions or to understand 
the methods employed by Islamic charitable organizations that enabled them to frustrate 
investigations into their operations and money-laundering in support of those Islamic 
terrorist organizations that operated illegally under American law. Moreover, Islamic 
charities could invariably depend on local Muslims to defend them despite the fact they 
would never receive or demand an accounting of their donations. Reputable Islamic 
charitable institutions traditionally devoted to educational and humanitarian works could 
easily be hijacked by Islamists without the knowledge of the Muslim congregation who 
disapproved of them. 

Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Kenneth Dam made it very clear that Muslim 
charities, one of the pillars of the Islamic faith, would receive increasing scrutiny despite 
the fact that FTATC had yet to acquire the necessary evidence to determine which 
charities had been using funds for uncharitable purposes "At the same time, there is no 
denying that some legitimate charities have been penetrated by terrorists or terrorist 
supporters - possibly by only a few managerial employees - who misdirect a portion of 
the charity's funds for terrorist ends . . . [and those front charities] primarily organized 
and directed to abuse charitable status for terrorist ends .... [who threatened] not only 
their targets, but their donors" in their efforts to extract donations. "Our challenge is to 
prevent terrorists from using charities as a cover for supporting terrorism while ensuring 
that charitable giving and charitable works continue. " [101 

In order for FTATC to begin freezing the flow of funds through charities for Islamist 
terrorist organizations, it had to build a database. This was extremely difficult, for there 
were hundreds of Islamic non-government organizations (NGOs) operating throughout 
the world, and the number of those charities that supported the Islamist revolution could 
not be guessed Moreover, like charities in the West, those in the East could be created 
for a particular purpose and upon completion of the project disappear from the record. 
Nevertheless, the work of FTATC seeking "transparency and oversight" of Muslim 
charities was cautiously regarded with favor by the Muslim community and those Islamic 
governments who were as anxious as the USA to know the operations of Islamic 
charities in their own countries. The Bush administration announced that it was 
"gratified by the positive response that these initiatives have received from other 
governments and the charitable community. " [111 

Regulating the industry of Islamic charity and humanitarian assistance is critical to the 



well-being of Islam in the USA. This is because of the extent to which terrorists 
operating front organizations have raised funds under the guise of charity and our need 
to preserve our ability to give of ourselves that tithe on behalf of others without fear that 
in trying to make the world a better place we actually make it worse. 



Chapter 1 The third pillar of Islam: zakat 



And they have been commanded no more than this: to worship Allah, offering Him 
sincere devotion, being true [in faith]; to establish regular Prayer and to practice 
regular charity; and that is the religion right and straight. 

(Sura 98.6) 



Of their wealth, take alms [sadaqa] so you may purify and sanctify them. 

(Sura 9.103) 



Establish regular Prayer and give regular Alms, and loan to Allah a beautiful loan. 

(Sura 73.21) 



Zakat, derived from zaka' (thrive, increase, to be pure in heart, righteous, good), is 
obligatory almsgiving for all adult Muslims who possess at least a minimum of personal 
wealth. It became one of the five pillars of Islam following the Prophet Muhammad's flight 
to Medina in 622. It should not, however, be confused with voluntary and spontaneous 
giving by individuals - sadaqa(gifts) - which is highly regarded as an act of piety 
usually given in money. Indeed, the Quran requires Muslims of all stations to be 
charitable to the poor, and in one popular Quranic concordance a scholar has listed 
fifty-one specific references in twenty-four separate sura (chapters) of the Quran that 
refer to spending (infaq) and include charitable giving. [121 Zakat is specifically 
mentioned more than thirty times in the Quran, and any Muslim who ignores that 
obligation would be regarded as a pariah. In a noted Hadith (saying of the Prophet) 
from Ibn Khuzama, the Prophet Muhammad is quoted as saying, "When you have paid 
the zakat of your wealth you have driven its evil away from you." The first Caliph, Abu 
Bakr al-Siddiq (d. 635), supporter, confidant, and friend of the Prophet, defined the 
importance of zakat. "In the name of Allah, I will fight those who may differentiate 
between salat [prayers] and zakat; those who may fulfill one act of worship and lapse on 
another."[13l 

Before giving zakat one must possess a minimum amount of property (nisab) beyond 
that required for basic daily needs - food, clothing, and shelter, and in the modern age 
the expenses associated with employment. Annually each Muslim voluntarily calculates 
his or her zakat individually on all other property - gold, silver, cash, securities, loans 
received, all business profits, and goods, specifically fish, crops, and animals - at the 
traditional rate of 2.5 percent per lunar year (354 days) except for agricultural crops, 



which are reckoned at the rate of 5 percent if the harvest is from irrigated or 10 percent 
from rain-fed land. Zakat is also calculated on the value of products that are dried and 
stored. The tithe for grazing animals may be paid in kind or in value on a sliding scale of 
the number of animals owned, but it seldom exceeds three animals from a herd of 120. 
In addition there is a special zakat (zakat al-fitr) equal to the cost of one day's food for 
each member of a donor household: it is collected at the end of Ramadan and is used 
for the fast-breaking celebrations of impoverished individuals and households. 

Zakat is calculated annually, usually in a lump sum and often during the month of 
Ramadan when Muslims, by giving alms and fasting at the same time, can 
simultaneously fulfill two of the five pillars of Islam. Zakat has never been regarded as a 
tax on wealth. Ideally, it is understood to be an act of individual, voluntary purification to 
share one's good fortune with those less prosperous. If problems are encountered 
calculating zakat, Muslims consult the Quran, Sunna, and when necessary Islamic law, 
the Shari'a. No sharp business practices (hiyal) or legal mumbo-jumbo (hila) are 
tolerated. [141 Soon after the death of the Prophet there arose an obvious need to 
organize the collection of zakat and to ensure its distribution to assist the poor and 
promote Islam. Within a century zakat had become institutionalized in most Muslim 
communities as an integral part of the Islamic state treasury (bayt al-mal) from which it 
was distributed to recipients. Historically, the collection, control, and distribution of zakat 
were the tasks of the Islamic state or the Muslim ulama (learned clergy, Islamic 
scholars). It was obligatory but voluntary almsgiving, and theoretically the only "tax" to 
be levied on Muslims by an Islamic state. Ostensibly, the Caliph was ultimately 
responsible "to collect and distribute the zakat," but in practice these tasks were 
delegated to his principal governors or, in those territories that did not recognize the 
Caliph, to the ruling shaykhs, sultans, or their administrative officials who usually 
included the ulama and Muslim clerics. 1151 

Charitable recipients 

If zakat is required of all Muslims, its recipients are almost as comprehensive because 
the seven categories of those eligible are very broadly defined: the poor; converts; 
wayfarers; those in bondage or in debt; those committed to Allah for the spread and 
triumph of Islam; newcomers whose faith is weak; and new converts to Islam "whose 
hearts have been [recently] reconciled [to truth]." Moreover, zakat may be used to 
support those who administer it (amileen). 



Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in 
the path of Allah, not [only] for Jihad [but] for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will 
be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some 
supplies related to the war effort, zakat money should be used provided the effort is to 
raise the banner of Islam. 



[16] 



This explanation is reinforced by the Islamist Khilafah Rashidah, who argued that zakat 
may be spent in "the way of Allah . . . This means spending to facilitate and enhance 
Jihad. Whenever 'Fi Sabeelilallah' [In the Way of Allah] is mentioned in the Qu'ran it 
means nothing other than Jihad " [17] 

If zakat can be used in the path of Allah by mujahideen, it also supports Islamic 
charities and social welfare organizations that address the socioeconomic needs of 
emerging Muslim societies. Janine A. Clark, a careful observer of Islamic medical 
clinics in Egypt, the Islamic Center Charity Society in Jordan, and the Islah Women's 
Charitable Society in Yemen, has examined the structure and dynamics of emerging 
Islamic institutions and their social and political impact in poor communities. She 
questions the widespread assumption that such charitable organizations, which benefit 
both from zakat and state financing, primarily serve the poorer classes. In fact, they are 
managed by and provide substantial assistance to the middle class. [181 Rather than 
supporting, uplifting, or mobilizing the poor, Islamic charitable institutions with zakat 
monies often play an important role in strengthening the social networks that bind 
middle-class professionals, volunteers, and clients. Ironically, ties of solidarity that 
develop along these horizontal lines foster the development of new social networks and 
the diffusion of new ideas at the expense of impoverished and marginalized Muslims. 



Zakat in history 

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad his legitimate successors, Abu Bakr, Umar, 
and Uthman (r. 632-656), were the appropriate collectors of zakat. Upon the 
assassination of the Caliph Uthman in 656, the supporters of Ali ibn Abi Talib 
(602-661), the cousin of Muhammad, believed that the caliphate should pass only to the 
rightful descendants of the Prophet. Ali was soon challenged by Mu'awiya ibn Abi 
Sufyan (c. 602-680), a cousin of Uthman, whose opposition to Ali precipitated the great 
schism in Islam between Sunni and Shi'ite that remains to this day. When Ali was 
assassinated in 661, his followers (known as shi'atAli, the partisans of Ali; hence the 
terms Shi'ite and Shi'ism), acknowledged the sons of Ali by the Prophet's daughter 
Fatima, Hasan and Husayn, to be the rightful heirs. Hasan declined to contest the 
succession, and Husayn, who agreed to assert his claim to the imamate, was soon killed 
by Mu'awiya's Umayyad successor. This provoked opposition to the Umayyads, the 
expansion of Shi'ism, and its association with the descendants of Husayn whom the 
Shi'ites believed were the only rightful leaders of the Muslim community, the Imams. 

It was during the rule of the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq (705-770), in the mid-eighth 
century that the rudiments of Shi'a theology were formed, consisting in the belief that 
the Imam, presumably a descendant of Husayn, held the secrets of religious knowledge 
(ma'rifa) and therefore the supreme authority in all matters of state. The larger Shi'ite 
group later recognized that the authority of the imamate passed through twelve 
successors before the line disappeared. These Shi'ites, known as Twelvers or Imamis, 
believe that the last of the twelve Imams will reveal himself as the leading religious leader 
(the Mahdi) to reestablish his authority over the Islamic community and usher in an age 
of justice and righteousness. The smaller Shi'ite group, known as Seveners or Isma'ilis, 



were convinced that the imamate disappeared with the death of Ja'far's son Isma'il, the 
seventh Imam, but that he too will return to establish the virtuous age. 

Historically the majority of Muslims, the Sunni, regarded zakat as a special obligation, 
one of the pillars of Islam, but in reality for them it soon became just another tax 
collected by the state. The minority of Muslims, the Shi'ites, however, do not 
acknowledge the right of the temporal government to tax and thus regard zakat more an 
act of piety than an obligation. Whether the Seventh or the Twelfth was the last Imam, it 
remained unthinkable to have zakat, the very pillar of religious piety, collected by the 
state as among Sunni Muslims. The responsibility for the collection and distribution of 
zakat therefore devolved upon the religious leaders, the ulama, who were the 
interpreters of the Quran and Hadith and those judicial scholars who elaborated the 
principles of Islamic law, the Shar'ia. As a religious class they regulated Islamic 
education, trained teachers, theologians, and officials, and dominated the life of the 
residential halls of learning, the madrasas. As lawyers and judges they regulated Islamic 
society by matters such as wills, marriage, and trade. It was no coincidence that all of 
these profoundly important functions in the life of the Islamic community were precisely 
those projects and pursuits for which zakat was intended and logically the ulama should 
control. 

Elsewhere in the Muslim world the collection and distribution of zakat was undertaken 
by the state. Anomalies have occurred, such as its collection during the Ottoman Empire 
when the collection of tax and zakat was farmed out to individuals after they had paid a 
lump sum to the Ottoman treasury for their franchise. There was much room for 
corruption in this system, for the collector sought to extract the maximum amount 
possible. The Prophet or his companions never intended zakat to be an onerous 
imposition, but a reasonable, tolerable, and affordable donation for charitable purposes, 
rather than a scheme to eliminate poverty or, today, a substitute for a tax based on net 
income. 

Throughout the ages the ambiguities of zakat have been discussed and debated by 
theologians, jurists, and Muslim rulers, but the demands of modernity and the staggering 
improvement in the means of communication in the latter decades of the twentieth 
century have transformed the examination of zakat from the local and parochial to a 
subject for debate throughout the greater Muslim world. In the last decade of the 
twentieth century there were, and there continue to be, a plethora of periodic 
international Islamic conferences devoted solely to zakat, as well as others concerning 
economics, banking, and charities in which zakat is invariably a subject for discussion, 
particularly the means to modernize its distribution. At the International Conference on 
Zakat held in Kuala Lumpur in 1990 the participants were unusually candid and admitted 
that zakat, in comparison to secular renewal and welfare programs, had accomplished 
little to alleviate poverty. In Pakistan some 25,000 inefficient and often corrupt local 
committees distribute more than six billion rupees from zakat to two-and-a-half million 
impoverished Pakistanis. There has been, however, no diminution of poverty, and the 
distribution of zakat has been unfavorably compared to the programs of private 
charitable institutions which "have done a much better job of coming to the help of the 
needy. "[191 During the Eighth World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) held in 
Amman, Jordan, in October 1998, Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal urged Muslim youth 
to create an international zakat fund to be used in support of refugees, since 
three-quarters of all the world's refugees are to be found in Muslim countries. At the 



Fifth International Conference on Zakat held in Kuwait in 1998, zakat was not only seen 
as charity for the poor but as a pool of funds for schemes to employ them. Another 
concern expressed at the conference were means by which Muslim governments 
involved in the collection and distribution of zakat could work directly with international 
aid organizations to implement joint programs to benefit the poor and needy. There has 
also been much concern to improve the cooperation between zakat organizations and 
other Muslim charities working throughout the Muslim world, for despite perennial pleas 
and proposals there is no single Islamic center devoted solely to the study and research 
of zakat, particularly its distribution and recipients. 1201 All of these recommendations led 
directly to the persistent appeal for an international body to coordinate zakat institutions 
throughout the Muslim world. [211 



Zakat: the Egyptian experience 

In recent times the obligatory payment of zakat has been implemented by Saudi Arabia 
in 1951, Pakistan in 1981, and the Sudan since 1982. Elsewhere in the Muslim world 
Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, Jordan, and Oman have enacted zakat laws and 
established zakat commissions. Nevertheless, the payment of zakat still remains 
voluntary. Several Muslim states have Tax and Zakat Commissions, whose 
commissioners are usually selected from men known for their honesty and piety, while 
commission employees are paid by the state. [221 These commissions act as the 
guardians of zakat to see that it is indeed used for charitable purposes and not diverted 
by the state for purposes never intended - as attempted in Egypt by Gamal Abdel 
Nasser and his successors. In command of the army and the police, Nasser mobilized 
the urban masses for his revolutionary schemes of agrarian reform that added millions 
of the rural fellahin to his urban poor supporters in the cities. Social reform to benefit 
the Egyptian poor required large sums of money, and the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, 
desperate to tap such a substantial financial resource as zakat for social works, sought 
to take over its collection and distribution because it was a "responsibility of the state, in 
the framework of its role protecting religion and the earthly policies." This was not just a 
theological dispute as to who should manage the proceeds of one of the pillars of Islam, 
but a very practical effort by the state to seize control of E£12 billion (approximately 
$2.5 billion) annually. With so much money and the concept of zakat at stake, the 
proposal by Egypt's Islamic Economic Center to replace a personal voluntary Islamic 
obligation by a "tax" from a secular Muslim government was sent to Egypt's supreme 
religious authority, the Grand Shaykh of Al Azhar. He replied that Islam itself made 
every Muslim free "to choose the object on which his Zakat will be spent." He reasoned 
that such a law would be perceived as a tax by many Muslims and would actually "cause 
people to escape their responsibility of donating their share of the Zakat." [231 

Upon the death of Nasser in 1970 his successor, Anwar Sadat, after eight months 
maneuvering for power, sought to secure his position as president. He released political 
and religious prisoners of the Nasser era, returned properties sequestered in the cause 
of socialism, and in choreographed displays of his own devotion to Islam, tolerated 
hitherto banned Islamist political groups. Sadat cultivated the Muslim Brothers, 
commonly known as the Ikhwan (Ar. ikhmn, brotherhood), whom Nasser had rigorously 
suppressed after they attempted his assassination in 1954. Islamist newspapers and 



cassettes, including lectures and sermons by noted Islamists, were now freely sold to an 
eager audience, and the Muslim Brothers were let out of jail to support Sadat against the 
hated former supporters of Nasser. The Ikwan newspaper, Al-Da'wa, circulated openly 
and was perhaps the most popular non-government newspaper The Muslim Brothers 
were now free to revive without restrictions their charitable works and in the 1980s 
began to use zakat to finance schools, hospitals, and daycare centers. Their outreach 
was so powerful that the movement was seen as creating a "parallel social welfare 
system independent of the state. " [241 

In their efforts to consolidate support among the Egyptian masses by a program of 
social welfare the Muslim Brothers also solicited sadaqa from wealthy individuals as well 
as from Ikhwan in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In 
the management of these substantial funds the more militant Ikhwan cells, which Sadat 
had never embraced in his nascent alliance with the Muslim Brothers, obtained a steady 
source of revenue. Eventually, Sadat's unilateral peace with Israel, his arrest of most 
opposition activists, and the failure of his economic program produced a dramatic 
proliferation of Islamist Ikhwan cells in poor Egyptian neighborhoods. On 6 October 
1981 members of one of those cells, al-Jihad, assassinated Anwar Sadat. His 
successor, Hosni Mubarak, abandoned any thought of making zakat a tax and has 
continued the Egyptian experience of an uneasy balance between the charitable efforts 
undertaken by the state and those of the Islamic societies. In the Egypt of today, and 
elsewhere throughout the Muslim world, the payment, collection, and distribution of zakat 
is not fixed in secular or theological cement. 



Zakat in the Sudan 



In general there has been a scarcity of information regarding zakat in pre-colonial 
Africa. There were some attempts to introduce a form of taxation based on Islamic law 
and in accordance with Muslim precepts, but few states adopted any regulated form of 
religious taxation for any significant period of time During the Islamic state of the 
Mahdiya in the Sudan (1885-1898) the Khalifa Abd Allahi introduced and administered 
a regular system of zakat that was abandoned after the British conquest in 1898. A 
hundred years later, however, the Sudan government, hard pressed for revenue, began 
the collection of zakat as a tax inescapable as death itself. In 1980 a zakat fund was 
legally established. In 1982 the payment was made obligatory for all Sudanese Muslims, 
and the former Directorate of Taxes became the Chamber of Zakat and Taxes with an 
official Zakat Board (Diwan al-Zakah). Zakat would be paid on salary, professional 
income, livestock, agricultural products, company earnings, and the sale of personal 
assets. The funds were then dispersed by the board: 25 percent for the fuqara, the poor 
who do not possess wealth equal to the nisab; 25 percent for masakin, destitute 
individuals who must beg for their daily food; 10 percent for employees and 
administration; 10 percent for converts and debtors; 20 percent for "the way of Allah" 
(Jihad fi sabeelilli): and finally 10 percent for wayfarers. The law was rewritten in 1986 
and again in 1990 to conform more stringently to the Islamist ideology of the National 
Islamic Front (NIF) following the coup d'etat of Brigadier Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir 
on 30 June 1989. In 1990 local commissions were created in the eight northern and 
Muslim-dominated provinces to prepare lists of the needy. A consultation committee of 



experts in Shari'a rendered "opinions" on the collection and distribution of zakat, but its 
imposition on livestock, supposed to have begun in 1991, was deferred for many 
years. [251 

In April 2004 the Sudanese of the capital were shocked when the respected President 
of Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Dr. Gasim Badri, was threatened with 
violence by armed zakat police who entered the campus. He was forcefully taken to their 
waiting car, which was, however, quickly surrounded by his young women students who 
pelted the police with stones, driving them from the campus. The police promised to 
return with a larger force to collect zakat, but when news of the assault spread through 
Omdurman and Khartoum, there was widespread indignation and a public outcry the 
government could not ignore. An official apology was issued, and the Ahfad campus 
returned to normal, but this crude attempt reminded the Sudanese that in an Islamist 
state one does not easily avoid the payment of zakat. 



Sadaqa 

Although all Muslims are expected to give zakat, individual exemplary Muslims confirm 
their good fortune, piety, and prestige by giving gifts (sadaqa) and larger endowments 
(waqf) for specific causes that are neither expected nor required but given 
spontaneously in the spirit of Islam to meet the needs of the Muslim community. These 
voluntary grants {inlaq) are used to support the favorite charities of the donors and can 
embrace everything from jihad to assisting the poor and feeding the needy. It is 
assumed that the wealthy, motivated by an "inner feeling of responsibility," will support 
the congregation of Islam. Sadaqa was an individual act and acknowledged throughout 
the Islamic world as a symbol of piety, generosity, and blessedness - the wealthy 
merchant, landowner, or official who gives alms to the unfortunate and gifts to the 
deserving. The sadaqa is thus a pious, private, and often secret act given of one's own 
free will. It is unlike zakat, which is expected annually. This spirit of giving does not find 
its precepts in the Quran or in Shari'a, but in one's heart. From the richest to the 
poorest Muslim, it is an act of personal devotion and unlike zakat is not bound by a 
percentage of one's wealth. 

Throughout the Muslim world, either where a Muslim ruled or where the Islamic 
community was small or isolated among non-Muslim societies, it was the tradition for the 
imam (leader of the daily prayer) of the local Muslim community to call for voluntary 
donations for a variety of causes. In many Muslim states where the administration and 
distribution of charitable donations were decentralized sadaqa rather than zakat became 
the principal source of Muslim charity. In Canada and the USA where the tithe, 
regardless of whether it be Christian or Muslim, is regarded as a tax rather than a 
benefice, "the voluntary distribution of alms, sadaqa, was preferred to the 
institutionalized almsgiving, namely zakat." f261 Private donations of sadaqa provided an 
essential means by which mosques and their outreach programs in support of Muslim 
communities were able to survive in North America. 



Waqf 



In Islam, as in Christianity, when a person dies he or she can specifically provide for 
"ongoing charity" in the same manner that property is left to heirs. Muslim jurists have 
defined "ongoing charity" to encompass endowments known as waqf (pi. awqaf), 
meaning in Islam to hold, confine, and preserve certain property in perpetuity for 
religious or philanthropic purposes or the alleviation of poverty as specified by the 
donor. The waqf, whether waqf khayr (charitable trust) or the waqf ahl (family 
endowment), was the direct result of pious Muslims voluntarily and privately seeking to 
convert personal assets to serve the public welfare or Islam. The most notable waqf khayr 
is the Islamic Cultural Foundation established by King Faisal shortly before his death to 
support the Islamic Center in Geneva and thus the spread of Islam in Europe. Waqf 
applies to non-perishable property that cannot be consumed, such as land, buildings, 
books, or stocks, and it thus forms the third leg of the Islamic charitable triad with zakat 
and sadaqa. There are generally three kinds of waqf. the religious waqf to build and 
support mosques: the more philanthropic waqf to support the interests of the people, 
such as libraries, education, health service, parks, and roads: and the waqf that 
specifically grants the revenue from an endowment to the poor. The first two awaqf were 
established at the time of the Prophet: the third from his second Caliph, Umar ibn 
al-Khattab (r. 635-644). The first religious waqf was for the construction and support of 
the mosque of Quba' in Medina in 622. It established the historical principle that a waqf 
should be used for the building and maintenance of mosques. The philanthropic waqf 
was also the initiative of the Prophet when a Muslim called Mukhairiq died in 626, 
leaving his seven orchards to Muhammad, who made them a ivaqffor the benefit of the 
poor. Since that time the philanthropic waqf has come to embrace a wide range of 
educational and social activities, not simply the needy. The third kind of waqf was 
established by the Caliph Umar solely to assist the destitute. 

Some Muslim jurists have argued that Allah is the real recipient of a waqf, but in law 
and practice the owners are the beneficiaries, although they are not permitted to 
dispose of the property or use it in any way that deviates from the expressed wishes of 
the donor. This means that once property is designated a waqf, it remains a waqf 
forever. After a lengthy legal process it may be exchanged for a property of equal value, 
but that is uncommon since those who establish a waqf usually provide detailed 
documentation as to how it is to be used. Such instructions have been supported by 
Islamic courts for hundreds of years. The combination of the donor strictly specifying 
the use of the waqf and the judgments and precedents from Islamic courts has 
established the principle of perpetuity in a waqf. Any revenues from a waqf must be used 
for the objective stipulated by its founder. If, for whatever reason, the specific purpose 
is no longer feasible the revenues from the endowment go to the poor and needy. 
Throughout the centuries most awqaf consisted of real estate given by donors, who must 
be legally of sound mind and body, making a sincere act of charity. 

In principle the founder designates how the waqf is to be administered and usually 
appoints an individual known as the mutawalli who is responsible for managing the waqf 
in the best interests of the beneficiaries. His or her first duty is to preserve the property: 
the second duty is to maximize the revenues for the beneficiaries. In return the founder 
normally decides the compensation for the mutawalli, but if by chance this has not been 
determined the mutawalli either volunteers his services or seeks compensation from the 
courts that are legally responsible for all matters or disputes concerning a waqf. As in 



zakat, the Egyptian example is instructive. In the eighth century a judge in Egypt 
established a special office to record awqaf and render judgment in any disputes. In 
time this office was placed under the overall supervision of the supreme judge. The 
administration of awqaf has also been institutionalized in Pakistan, Sudan, and Turkey 
and within the minority communities of India, Kenya, and Uganda, but the "idea is not 
widely accepted by the rest of the Muslim World. "[27] During the 1980s and 1990s an 
increasing number of waqf bequests were managed by one of the Islamic banks such as 
the powerful Islamic Development Bank Group of Saudi Arabia founded in 1973 to foster 
economic development and social progress. 

The long history of the waqf, fourteen centuries after the death of the Prophet, and the 
permanent nature and management of the institution has resulted in the accumulation of 
a huge amount of property throughout the Muslim world devoted to religious and 
philanthropic purposes. In the nineteenth century waqf represented one-quarter of all the 
land under cultivation in Egypt and about one-third in Turkey. In Palestine the number of 
awqaf deeds recorded up to the middle of the sixteenth century was 233, containing 890 
properties, in comparison with only 92 deeds of private ownership to 108 parcels of 
land. [281 Historically, the most frequent purpose of a waqf was for mosques, their 
construction, maintenance, and personnel. This would include salaries for the imam, the 
prayer leader and preacher of the mosque, and teachers of Islamic studies associated 
with it. This endowment has had a significant impact on Islamic societies; it has enabled 
the religious leaders and teachers, secured by a permanent source of income, to 
advocate social and political positions independent of and often in opposition to the 
ruling class. Education not specific to the mosque was the second-largest beneficiary 
from waqf. It was a common custom for the government to construct a school to which a 
waqf either given directly by an individual or assigned by the state, would endow its 
maintenance, teacher and staff salaries, student stipends, libraries, and books. The 
awqaf of the Ayyubids (1171-1250) and Mamluks (1250-1517) for schools in Egypt are 
a good example. In 1900 Jerusalem had sixty-four non-religious schools supported by 
waqf properties in Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. Perhaps the most dramatic example is 
the famous Islamic university, Al Azhar, founded in Cairo in 972. It was funded by waqf 
revenues until Muhammad Ali seized control of the Egyptian awqaf in 1812. The use of 
awqaf for financial assistance to students has also had a long and critical impact not 
unlike that of financial support for religious leaders, for historically waqf has created a 
learned elite quite distinct from the rich and ruling class. Many of these Muslim scholars 
and teachers came from poor and even slave origins, and often strongly opposed the 
policies and practices of their rulers. 

The third-largest beneficiaries of waqf were the poor, needy, orphans, and other 
marginalized peoples in Muslim society. Health services were particularly popular, and 
awqaf provided funds for construction, salaries for physicians and staff, and indigent 
patients. The famous Shishli Children's Hospital in Istanbul founded in 1898 is a 
well-known example. Waqf was also given to support animals, such as cats and 
unwanted horses. Other donors specified that their awqaf should help the indigent 
finance their pilgrimage to Mecca, the marriage of young women, and a host of other 
philanthropic purposes that were special to the donor. 

During the colonial period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the traditional 
management of awqaf remained undisturbed except in Algeria and Indonesia, but the 
introduction by all the colonial authorities of a western system of education with its 



secular emphasis on science and technology opened a cornucopia of economic 
opportunities that began to undermine, relentlessly and often unintentionally, traditional 
religious education already funded by awqaf. Independence by Muslim nation states 
from colonial rule, which was frequently accompanied by appeals to socialism, also 
transformed the long-standing relationship between awqaf and the state. Many waqf 
properties were simply confiscated by the state in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and 
Tunisia to be redistributed in programs of land reform. Other revenues from aivqafwere 
used for government economic and social programs. In return the state now assumed 
the financial responsibility for mosques, religious schools, and Islamic universities. 

Although some countries have recently sought to revive the customary waqf by new 
laws to recover former waqf properties confiscated by the state and to encourage 
individuals to create new awqaf the dislocation of waqf management and the creation of 
large sums now distributed to porous charitable organizations has seriously diluted if not 
destroyed the principle of permanence in favor of grants to agencies whose lax 
accountability any older, traditional waqf donor would denounce with scorn. There is no 
question that awqaf have been channeled through Islamic charitable organizations to 
support the mujahideen and their various jihadist movements. In 1997 Trueco, a Swiss 
investment firm, was asked to create a waqf to support construction of hospitals and 
schools for the Taliban militia and its supporters in Afghanistan. Trueco could find 
nothing in the request that would violate Swiss or Saudi law, but under heavy pressure 
from the Clinton administration, which possessed "evidence" that Saudi trusts had been 
used to fund terrorist groups, it refused to become involved. [291 Despite this success, 
the Clinton administration in fact failed to convince the Saudi government to regulate the 
establishment of awqaf more rigorously. Saudi officials were aware that funds from 
charitable trusts did make their way to terrorist groups, but remained in a quandary as 
to how to redirect such funds legally protected by the Shari'a. 

An example of how a waqf can be vulnerable for use to support terrorists was the one 
created by the Saudi shipping magnate, Abdul Latif Jameel, who left a fortune estimated 
at $7 billion upon his death in 1993 to fund the charitable aims of militant fundamentalist 
movements in Algeria, Sudan, Somalia, and in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Saudi 
officials had previously been unable and unwilling to interfere in the distribution of the 
estate of this respected family until 1992 when, following the Persian Gulf war, King 
Fahd instituted reforms to control waqf donations. The royal family could no longer 
ignore the danger to themselves when in the guise of Islamic charity awqaf were used to 
finance terrorism. The new Minister of Pilgrimage Affairs, responsible for the provision 
of facilities for the visits of pilgrims to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, was now 
placed in charge of all maintenance for mosques throughout the kingdom: thereafter, 
the administration of land held by religious trusts, the awqaf, including the bequest from 
Abdul Latif Jameel, was monitored by a commission responsible for excluding 
objectionable groups seeking funds. 



Saudi Arabia and Islamic education 

The greatest challenge to traditional Islamic education, historically supported by zakat 
and waqf, has been the introduction of western secular and scientific education during 
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The proliferation of government schools 



whose curricula introduced the sciences and social sciences, in contrast to the 
madrasas, which emphasized the recitation and interpretation of the Quran and Islamic 
legal studies, would challenge traditional Islamic education and increasingly isolate 
Muslim clerics from an ever more secular Muslim society. In reaction, there was a 
revival of Islam in education during the last two decades of the twentieth century that has 
strengthened traditional Islamic education promoted by Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia 
Islam is the cornerstone of all education and the government controls all aspects of the 
educational system. Committees in the Ministry of Education supervise everything from 
the curriculum to textbooks, students, and teachers. Saudi Arabia is also the most 
determined of Muslim nations to disseminate Islamic education, spending billions of 
dollars "to spread Islam to every corner of the earth. " [301 From the most humble 
madrasa in Tajikistan to the first university inaugurated on the island of Zanzibar in 
1998, the Saudi government and individual wealthy Saudi notables through 
organizations such as the Darul-lman Charitable Association contribute lavishly to 
Islamic education throughout the Muslim world. 

Saudi influence has been pervasive in creating schools, curricula, and textbooks 
influenced by the teachings of Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) 
that instruct Muslims to return to the fundamentals of Islam as preached by the Prophet 
Muhammad. The Higher Committee for Educational Policy of Saudi Arabia insists that 
the most important aspect of education is to inculcate students with Islamic values that 
enable the individual to spread the Muslim faith. Saudi students in Saudi Arabia or 
abroad are expected to accept the mission to propagate Islam worldwide. The Saudi 
Cultural Mission to the United States has for years distributed Education in Saudi Arabia, 
a book approved and published by the Saudi Higher Committee for Educational Policy 
that embraces 236 principles to promote Islamic thought and denounces any theology 
or political philosophy that contradicts Islamic law. When it became clear after 9/11 that 
former Saudi students were highly committed believers in these principles, the Saudi 
Minister of the Interior, Prince Naif bin Abd al-Aziz, in defense of Saudi education 
refused to make any changes in the curriculum. "We do believe in the soundness of our 
educational curriculum, but we never oppose development of educational methods in a 
manner that does not run counter to the country's deep-rooted principles . . We 
strongly believe in the correctness of our education system and its objectives. We don't 
change our systems on the demands of others. " [311 

The Saudi Minister of the Interior was not the only Muslim to be placed on the 
defensive in the aftermath of 9/11. When the Sixth International Conference on Zakat 
was held in 2003, only thirty-eight participants, from fifteen nations, convened in Doha, 
Qatar. Their discussions were preoccupied with evidence collected in the West in the 
aftermath of 9/11 which indicated that Muslim charitable institutions, knowingly or 
unknowingly, were being used to support militant Islamist activities with funds from zakat. 
There were vehement denials that any links between zakat and the revolutionary 
Islamists existed. Many at the conference condemned the USA for unfairly implicating 
one of the most cherished institutions of Islam in terrorist practices. The radical 
Egyptian cleric and scholar Dr. Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, then teaching at the 
University of Qatar, was the most vociferous in his opposition to claims that zakat funded 
terrorism, and as the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, labeled all 
such prescriptions as "calumnies . . . Charity has everything to do with feeding the 
hungry and serving the community. Those who make such accusations do not 
understand that we pursue noble goals required by our religion. " [321 In the end the 



conference completely rejected any allegations that zakat had been employed in support 
of terrorism. 

In fact, the investigation of Islamic charities located in Falls Church and Herndon, 
Virginia, demonstrated that al-Qaradawi was one of the largest shareholders and a 
board member of Al Taqwa (Fear of God), a Swiss/Bahamian-based financial network 
whose administrators "have been slapped with terrorist designations by both the United 
States and United Nations" for support of Al Qaeda. 1331 As the lists grow longer, it is not 
surprising that Islamic charity, the spirit of zakat, has been challenged. 



Chapter 2 Saudi Arabia and its Islamic charities 



When a man gives Zakah to the poor he cannot stipulate the conditions on how the 
poor man should spend the money. If he spends on some evil acts it is not the 
responsibility of the donor. 

Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, Governor of Riyadh Region, 8 November 2002 1341 



It was the third night of Ramadan, October 2001 , and the smell of winter was in the air. 
Sayf-al-Adl al-Masri, the Al Qaeda chief of operations in Kandahar, Afghanistan, awoke 
just past midnight. The Egyptian was "feeling anxious and [I] sensed there was a danger 
close to me." The war against the Taliban government of Afghanistan had erupted on 7 
October, and he was expecting an attack. He awoke his Al Qaeda brothers who were 
asleep in his empty house some distance away and together they heard the sound of a 
major explosion Al-Masri would later write: "I asked the brothers by telephone and 
learned that the second house of the Al-Wafa Charity Foundation in Kandahar had 
been pinpointed and hit with a cruise missile." The CIA had been tracking Al Qaeda by 
their use of satellite phones and had determined that the Al Wafa house was an Al 
Qaeda operations center. The missile destroyed the house and killed a number of 
jihadists.[35] 

The destruction of the headquarters of the Saudi Al Wafa Humanitarian Foundation 
(Wafa al-lgatha al-lslamiyya) in Afghanistan went largely unnoticed in the western 
media, for the target of this expensive cruise missile was the ramshackle office of an 
unknown Saudi charity. Al Wafa may have been little known outside Saudi Arabia, but 
given the importance of charitable giving in the Muslim world and the widespread 
funding support for Islamic charities, it was worth much more than a fleeting notice in 
the European and US press. 



Charities and charitable donations in Saudi Arabia 

In 1979 Saudi Arabia was confronted by new challenges from abroad and at home. In 
January the Shah of Iran fled into exile, and the triumphal return of the charismatic 
Ayatollah Khomeini on 1 February confirmed the success of the clerical revolution and 
the declaration of the Islamic Republic of Iran in April. The Shi'ite clerical establishment 
regarded their seizure of the government of Iran, however, as only the beginning of the 
revival of Islam throughout the Muslim world under the aegis of Shi'ism, which defiantly 
challenged the comfortable role of Saudi Arabia as the guardian of the Holy Cities and 
the heartland of Sunni Islam. Moreover, the revival of Islam could not be left solely in the 
hands of the Shi'ites of Iran, for the Sunni Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia theologically and 
historically despised them. At home, and presumably inspired by the Iranian Revolution, 
a group of Saudi Sunni Mahdists seized the Great Mosque of Mecca during the hajj 
pilgrimage to Mecca in November 1979. Forcibly expelled, they were described as 
Islamist fanatics. They appeared, however, to be a network with a political as well as an 



Islamist agenda dedicated to overthrowing the monarchy. These two events shook the 
somnolent Saudis. Security was strengthened, and Saudi Arabia began to use its vast 
oil revenues to insure Saudi leadership in the resurgence and spread of Islam. The 
principal means to accomplish the latter objective was to increase financial support for 
Islamic - particularly Saudi Islamic - charities. At first the recipients were mainly in 
Muslim countries, but by the 1980s Saudi funds were spent to support Muslim 
communities in non-Islamic nations, particularly in Europe and the USA. 

The funds for Saudi Islamic charitable institutions were derived from oil. Literally 
billions of dollars were distributed for humanitarian purposes by individual donors, 
government ministries, and the royal family. Wealthy individual Saudis - businessmen, 
merchants, professionals - would support their favorite charities by performing sadaqa. 
During the last two decades of the twentieth century sadaqa became an increasingly 
important source of charitable giving, but the very privacy that accompanies it makes 
elusive any reckoning of the amount of those donations. Government ministries were 
somewhat more transparent, and of the nineteen ministries that manage the government 
of Saudi Arabia, eight are involved, directly or indirectly, in charitable giving: the 
Ministries of Finance (especially its Directorate General of Zakat and Income Tax), 
Education, Foreign Affairs, Health, Higher Education, Information, Pilgrimage, and the 
Ministry of Islamic Endowments and Guidance Affairs. The interest of these ministries in 
Islamic charities has grown proportionately with the number of important international 
charities founded in Saudi Arabia after 1979, and the most conspicuous supporter of 
Islamic charities was the Saudi royal family (see table 2.1 ). 
Table 2. 1 The Saudi royal family and its charitable interests 



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Since 1953 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been ruled by Kings Saud (r. 
1953-1964), Faisal (r. 1964-1975), Khalid (r. 1975-1982), Fahd (r. 1982-2005), and 
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz (2005-). In each case the most powerful members of the House 
of Saud have been celebrated for their support of various charitable organizations. The 
King is the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" and assumes all the responsibilities for 
charitable giving that title demands. King, Crown Prince, and princes have taken their 
responsibility to spread Islam throughout the world very seriously. Many billions of 
dollars were spent by King Fahd alone on some 210 Islamic centers; he supported more 
than 1,500 mosques and 202 colleges, and almost 2,000 schools for educating Muslim 
children in non-Islamic countries in Europe, North and South America, Australia, and 
Asia. All were to propagate the Wahhabi doctrine with great vigor. The most powerful 
members of the House of Saud followed the King's example, giving generously of their 
time and money to establish schools in seventeen countries in the West, eight nations in 
the Middle East and South Asia, and in thirteen states in Africa. [361 

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had a much greater impact in the Middle 
East, particularly Saudi Arabia, than the West appreciated. During the 1980s both 
private and public Saudi money played a critical role in supporting the Afghan 
resistance to Soviet military occupation. Indeed, Saudi princes and wealthy 
businessmen were extraordinarily generous in funding various Afghan-Arab movements 
fighting the Russians, and many mujahideen were Saudi citizens, often from influential 



families. Sometimes funds were directly solicited; others were given independently as 
sadaqa, but a more efficacious means to help the Afghan resistance was to give 
through Islamic charities. The established pattern of donations through the traditional 
charities was widely accepted, but the distinction between supporting jihad to promote 
the revival of Islam and, later, sustaining terrorism, became hopelessly blurred. There 
were, of course, many legitimate Islamic charities, but there were also those whose 
objectives and methods were obscure, dubious, and not very humanitarian. In time the 
distinction between freedom fighter and terrorist was difficult to establish. Dr. Anthony 
Cordesman, certainly no enemy of Saudi Arabia or its ruling family, has written that 
senior Saudis privately admitted that "the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, Saudi Foreign 
Ministry, and Saudi intelligence" all failed to comprehend the illegitimate activity 
undertaken by many "'Islamic' causes that have received Saudi money. " [371 

At the time of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 the pattern of giving 
through Islamic charities to promote the spread of Islam by resistance movements had 
been firmly established. It simply continued to flow with unrestricted generosity. This 
development did not go unnoticed by the Saudi government, but like western 
governments it was loath to intervene in the historic and honored tradition of giving to 
religious charities, particularly when the government was firmly committed to the spread 
of its Wahhabi ideology. Moreover, the Saudis regarded themselves as the guardians of 
Islam and were not about to appear less fervent in their support of the Islamic revival 
than their Shi'ite rivals in Tehran. This head-in-the-sand policy could not, however, be 
sustained, particularly after the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 
1993. Under pressure from Egypt and Pakistan, Saudi Arabia had terminated its 
support for camps controlled by Islamists on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier in 1992, and 
after the bombing of the World Trade Center a new law was promulgated that gave the 
Saudi government regulatory authority over funds being raised by Islamic charities. The 
Saudis were told that their donations would be monitored, and a "set of rules was 
established to allow the government to be able to trace whatever was going [out]. "[38] In 
1994 a Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs was created to supervise the distribution of 
charitable aid, but its management was ineffectual. 

Despite some efforts on the part of the Ministry of the Interior, which was responsible 
for monitoring and enforcing these regulations, it was unable or reluctant to stem the 
flow of funds to groups that used Islam for their own political rather than charitable 
purposes. The greatest difficulty was to distinguish between those Islamic charities 
solely committed to humanitarian relief and those determined to use the institution of 
Islamic charities to achieve political objectives by appeals to extreme interpretations of 
jihad, terrorism. The end of the Afghan war suddenly released a horde of fanatical 
mujahideen who found the means to continue their jihadist mission as employees in 
Saudi charities involved in the Balkan wars. By design or default the Saudi Arabian 
government did little to staunch the flow of riyals and rifles through Muslim charities to 
the Afghan-Arabs who dominated mujahideen activity in much of Bosnia It would be 
years before those concerned with counter-terrorism discovered that mujahideen 
financial networks required relentless scrutiny; the Saudi government announced in 
2002: 



Probably the most significant new action we have taken has been in the area of 



charitable giving ... In the past, we may have been naive in our giving and did not 
have adequate controls over all of our donations. As a consequence, some may have 
taken advantage of our charity and generosity. With the new steps we are taking, this 
is now changing. 

[391 



It was undeniable that for more than two decades funds obtained for charitable 
purposes and used by reputable international organizations had occasionally been used 
to support and arm jihadist movements. 



Saudi Arabia Red Crescent Society 

In June 1859 at the Battle of Solferino, involving French and Austrian armies in 
northern Italy, a Swiss humanitarian, Jean Henri Dunant (1828-1910), organized first 
aid for the many thousands of soldiers from both sides who were seriously wounded. He 
later proposed in his book Un Souvenir de Solferino, published in 1862, the formation of 
voluntary relief societies to care equally for the wounded in war from both sides. Two 
years later the Red Cross was founded in Geneva and legitimized by the Geneva 
Convention of 1864. Thereafter, the Red Cross gradually expanded its mission to assist 
those engaged in naval warfare, prisoners of war, and civilians caught up in the 
destruction of war. During the twentieth century its mandate became more sweeping to 
include the prevention and relief of human suffering. From the beginning the Red Cross 
has been a coalition of national affiliates in which the appellation "Red Cross" was used 
by Christian countries. After 1906, at the insistence of the Ottoman Empire, the 
societies in Muslim countries were entitled the "Red Crescent." The organization's 
official name was changed in 1986 to the International Movement of the Red Cross and 
Red Crescent with its headquarters in Geneva and a worldwide structure of the 
International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Red Cross and Red 
Crescent Societies. The Saudi Arabia Red Crescent Society (SARCS) is an important 
member of the 181 country societies of Red Cross and Red Crescent. 

Founded in 1933, SARCS has fourteen offices in the kingdom and over 3,000 paid 
salaried staff members, nearly all of whom are trained in the provision of emergency 
medical services and disaster preparedness. Its management of the kingdom's 
ambulance service has been widely praised, and its rapid response to the numerous 
crises, large and small, that accompany the annual pilgrimage and its seventy hajj 
health clinics has won the gratitude of pilgrims. The official SARCS budget for 2002 was 
a little more than $10 million, but budgets in Saudi Arabia are frequently disguised, and 
in reality its revenues were SR249 million ($66 million) for that year. The disparity is 
attributed to the "many private donors in Saudi Arabia [who] give funds for international 
relief missions" that do not appear in the official budget. Since 1980 SARCS has been 
active in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Pakistan, and Palestine; and its contributions 
in food, medicine, clothing, and shelter for Muslim countries have exceeded a billion 
Swiss francs ($600 million). [401 

SARCS was one of the first charitable organizations to provide humanitarian 
assistance for mujahideen wounded in the war in Afghanistan, and it soon became 



deeply committed to assist the growing Afghan refugee population in Pakistan. It worked 
in the Kachagari refugee camp for more than twenty years where it supported the 
Palestinian Dr. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (1941-1989), the "Godfather" of the Afghan 
jihad, who arrived in Peshawar to fight the Soviets for Islam. He soon became the most 
prominent Islamist in the Afghan jihad and its principal promoter, whose famous axiom 
attracted Muslims from everywhere to become mujahideen in the Islamist jihad: Jihad 
and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues. In 1984 he created 
the Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab (Mujahideen Services Bureau, MAK) to 
assist the Afghan jihad, and built a global network to recruit Arab mujahideen. It became 
the foundation for Al Qaeda, which began when, in the guesthouses of MAK, volunteers 
pouring into Pakistan were trained to fight for the jihad in Afghanistan. He would write in 
his Journey of Maktab Khadamat al-Mujahidin that the "Islamic foundations" provided 
support for MAK and its mujahideen, including everything from food to arms to ink for 
his magazine, Al Jihad. W] 

Azzam and MAK obtained private donations from Saudi princes, mosques, and 
substantial sums from the Saudi intelligence service, but also received steady and 
generous amounts of money from numerous Islamic charities, particularly SARCS and 
the Muslim World League (MWL).[42l SARCS played an especially important role. A 
skeptic once questioned Azzam regarding the smuggling of heavy equipment into the 
war zone, arguing that it would provide easy targets for Soviet aircraft. Azzam 
responded: "If that happens we shall ask God's pardon, and if not, we shall do our work. 
We got them into the country in the name of the Mujahidin via the Saudi Red 
Crescent."[43] Thanks to the generosity of the Saudis and the Central Intelligence 
Agency (CIA) the cornucopia of cash that overflowed to support the Afghan-Arabs 
seemed inexhaustible. 

A founding member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), Ayman Muhammad Rabie 
al-Zawahiri, joined the Saudi Red Crescent operation in Peshawar in 1985 and Wael 
Hamza Julaidan, a close associate of Osama bin Laden and known in Al Qaeda as Abu 
Hasan al-Madani, left King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia to be director of both 
SARCS and the South Relief Agency in Peshawar. He and the other Islamic leaders 
were avid and successful fundraisers. Just before his death in 1989 Dr. Azzam 
remarked that his organization had never lacked for funds because "the Saudi Red 
Crescent and the South Relief Agency headed by [Saudi Prince] Salman Abdel Aziz 
[had] a budget of 100 million riyals [$27 million] per year."[44] Inventories of weapons 
and notes from Bin Laden to Julaidan describing "an extreme need for weapons" were 
found on SARCS stationery, and in a 1999 interview with Al Jazeera television Osama 
bin Laden personally recognized the importance of Wael Julaidan and obliquely the role 
of SARCS. [451 

The support of SARCS for mujahideen operating abroad was not limited to the war in 
Afghanistan. When Mansur al-Suwaylim, brother of the deceased Chechen Jihad 
leader Samir Salih Abdallah al-Suwaylim (Abu Khattab), joined the Afghan-Arabs in 
1987, he was carrying two documents. One "was from the director of the Mujahidin 
Service Office in Al-Dammam, and the second from a person who had a special status 
with the official in charge of the Saudi Red Crescent in Pakistan. "[46] By 1993 SARCS 
was active in the Balkans, as was the Saudi High Relief Commission (SHRC), which 
was also providing humanitarian relief in Bosnia. More than a decade after the Soviet 
army left Afghanistan some eighty-nine Muslim relief workers with reported links to Al 



Qaeda were expelled by the Pakistan government, including a number who were 
SARCS employees. [471 Later, two Red Crescent administrators, also members of Al 
Qaeda, were arrested in 2001 for planning terrorist attacks against the US and British 
embassies in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The impeccable history of altruism by the International 
Movement of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent was compromised by the activities of 
SARCS in the mujahideen wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, but in the Middle East 
and North Africa Conference of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies its volunteers 
have vehemently and sincerely asserted that their objectives were strictly humanitarian. 



Muslim World League 

The Muslim World League (Rabitat al-Alami al-lslamiyya, MWL) was founded in 1962. 
Among its founders was Said Ramadan, grandson and spiritual heir of Hasan al-Banna, 
the father of the Muslim Brotherhood. Following his forced departure from Egypt in 
1954, Ramadan had founded the powerful Geneva Islamic Center. By 1970 the MWL 
had become one of the three most powerful charities established in Saudi Arabia. The 
league claims to be a non-government charitable organization committed to the 
propagation of the faith through the tenets of Wahhabi Islam. The 1960s and 1970s 
were decades of ferment in the Islamic world as well as in the West. There was growing 
concern among the faithful over the widening gap between the secular and Islamic 
worlds and the challenge to Islam from the culture of the West. They demanded a more 
modern and aggressive organization to promote Islam than the clerical and often divided 
ulama who were the historical guardians and interpreters of Islamic theological and legal 
thought. There were hundreds of Ikhwan who had fled from Egypt to become residents 
in Saudi Arabia, and they were adroit at accommodating their own radical and Salafist 
ideology to traditional Wahhabism. Thus, the Muslim Brothers possessed a profound 
influence on Saudi students and charities. The subsequent export of Islamist theology 
from Saudi Arabia to the Muslim world was in many instances the work of Ikhwan 
preachers and clerics, Saudi and non-Saudi, financed by Saudi charities who were the 
beneficiaries of the massive influx of petrodollars. At the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli 
war of 1973, Saudi Arabia continued to be the predominant member of the Organization 
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in September 1960. The dramatic 
increase in the price of oil produced a seemingly unlimited amount of cash for the 
Saudi royal family as well as for many new wealthy Saudis that enabled them to fulfill 
their Islamic obligations by their greater ability to contribute to Islamic charities of which 
the MWL was a principal beneficiary. 

Although a considerable portion of funding for MWL now comes from contributions by 
wealthy businessmen and zakat, the Saudi royal family remains the most substantial and 
steady donor both as private individuals and as representatives of the Saudi 
government. In March 1997 the Secretary-General, Dr. Abdullah al-Obaid, who was 
later appointed President of the first Saudi Arabia National Human Rights Association, 
thanked King Fahd for his continued support of the MWL, "noting that the Saudi 
government had officially provided more than $1.33 billion in financial aid to MWL since 
its founding in 1962. " [481 It was, therefore, very difficult to maintain the facade that 
MWL was a non-government organization as conceived in the West when in fact it is an 
agency of the Saudi government. Unlike the Red Crescent Society and other large 
international charities, MWL was ineluctably parochial, linked solidly to the Saudi 



government and dependent on its royal patronage. The current Secretary-General of 
MWL, Prince Abdullah bin Abd al-Muhsin al-Turki, is also the Minister of Islamic Affairs, 
Endowment Call and Guidance and has worked assiduously to promote Islam beyond 
the Middle East. In July 2002 at the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) he 
urged the coordination of Muslim organizations operating in the USA and offered MWL 
assistance in promoting their Islamic work. After 9/11 Prince Abdullah has consistently 
denounced terrorists, both officially and unofficially, and has been very careful to 
disassociate MWL from terrorism despite its past support for Afghan-Arabs in jihad 
movements in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. 

After its founding in 1962 MWL did little to foster Islamist movements until the war in 
Afghanistan. Afterward, not unlike SARCS, it began to support the recruitment of 
mujahideen and the movement of the materials of war under the guise of humanitarian 
assistance. The Palestinian Dr. Abdullah Azzam was appointed director of the MWL 
office in Peshawar where he was soon joined by Osama bin Laden, his former student 
at the King Abdul Aziz University in Jidda. With funding from MWL Dr. Azzam laid the 
foundations for what was to become MAK, the nexus for the movement of jihadists from 
the Muslim world to the war in Afghanistan. Following the assassination of Azzam in 
1989, he was succeeded by Wael Julaidan, then head of the Red Crescent in Pakistan, 
as director of the Peshawar branch of MWL. [491 



international Islamic Relief Organization 

Among the most important Saudi charitable organizations is the International Islamic 
Relief Organization (IIRO, also known as the Islamic Relief Organization, the 
International Relief Organization, and the Success Foundation), established during the 
22nd Session of the MWL held in Mecca in 1975 as its humanitarian non-government 
organization (NGO), and endorsed by the Saudi royal family shortly thereafter. Its credo 
was "Provide relief and aid to Muslims as peoples and groups wherever they are, should 
they face disasters endangering their being, their religious beliefs or their freedom." For 
years, zakat and sadaqa were collected by the Al Rajhi Banking and Investment 
Corporation, for the MWL account number 77700. 

Not unlike SARCS, the IIRO mission was to provide assistance to victims of war and 
natural disasters. However, there was a growing realization that 80 percent of the 
world's refugees were Muslims, and IIRO soon sought to help them by funding 
economic development projects, financial and management assistance to small 
commercial firms, and direct payments to the poor, widows, and orphans. Not 
surprisingly, as an appendage of MWL the humanitarian mission of IIRO included the 
protection of Muslim minorities and the sponsoring of programs for teaching and 
memorizing the Quran. With its headquarters in Jidda, IIRO has over a hundred offices 
worldwide with most in Africa (thirty-six) and Asia (twenty-four). The remaining thirty 
offices are equally divided between Europe and South and North America. 

IIRO is structured into a variety of departments - Urgent Relief and Refugees, Health 
Care, Orphans and Social Welfare, Education, and Agriculture - but its central mission 
is devoted to relief and refugee assistance where it has concentrated its efforts on 
medical, educational, and religious needs. This worldwide network is funded by 
charitable donations, including those in fulfillment of zakat obligations and gifts from 



members of the Saudi royal family, which are deposited in the Al Rajhi Banking and 
Investment Corporation in Riyadh. The funds for its operations outside Saudi Arabia are 
managed by the Islamic Affairs Department of the embassy of Saudi Arabia in each 
country .[50] In 1987 IIRO established the Sanabel al-Khair (Seeds of Charity) with its 
headquarters in Riyadh to provide IIRO with a stable income by investing some of its 
charitable contributions as an endowment. This ambitious plan was to fund international 
operations, provide financial stability, and make IIRO self-sufficient. Called Sana-Bell in 
the USA, Sanabel al-Khair opened its office outside Washington DC in the early 
1990s. [51l In 1997, in what had become an annual event, the Governor of Riyadh, 
Prince Salman, who controlled the disposition of the endowment's funds with an iron 
hand, opened the IIRO Sanabel al-Khair Charity Festival. Attended by members of the 
royal family and the heads of international aid organizations, the goal for that year alone 
was one billion riyals ($266.6 million) for the endowment. Certainly, the campaign would 
not have succeeded without the enormous financial contributions from the Saudi royal 
family including King Fahd bin Abd al-Aziz himself and Deputy Prime Minister and 
Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Saudi Benevolent Society, Prince (now King) 
Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz. There can be no question that the establishment of an 
endowment, a waqf. would guarantee a steady flow of funds into IIRO offices and 
activities overseas, but the very magnitude of the funds presented problems of policy 
and accountability that were largely ignored, providing opportunities for abuse and 
misuse. 

The first link that tied IIRO to the Islamist mujahideen was a handwritten note on IIRO 
stationery found in Bosnia. It was an account of a meeting in the late 1980s in which the 
Secretary-General of MWL informed representatives of Osama bin Laden that IIRO was 
offering its offices in support of the mujahideen. Thereafter, IIRO was suspected of 
terrorist links in the Philippines, Russia, East Africa, Bosnia, and India. Muhammad 
Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, was the director of IIRO in the 
Philippines, which supported the Salafi Abu Sayyaf organization. Mohammed 
al-Zawahiri, brother of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the confidant of Bin Laden and chief of 
EIJ, worked for IIRO in Albania during the 1990s. As an engineer, he helped EIJ 
members "land jobs with charities that were building mosques, orphanages and clinics 
there. "[52] A fellow EIJ leader, Talaat Fouad Abdul Qasim, who was under sentence of 
death in Egypt for terrorism, had earlier been director of the IIRO office in Peshawar, 
"specializing in funding Arab militants fighting alongside the Afghan Mujahedeen."[53] 
Granted political asylum in Denmark, he was seized by US agents when returning to 
Croatia in 1998. He was handed over to Egypt, tried by an Egyptian tribunal in Cairo, 
and executed. Another IIRO employee from Bangladesh, Sayed Abu Nasir, led a cell 
broken up by Indian police; it had intended to strike at the US consulates in Madras and 
Calcutta. Nasir "explained that his superiors told him of 40 to 50 percent of IIRO 
charitable funds being diverted to finance terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and 
Kashmir."[54] 

Table 2.2 Charitable entities belonging to or associated with the Al 
Qaeda organization. July 2004 



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IIRO used its charitable outreach to move funds not only to the Taliban and Al Qaeda 
but also to Jama'at al-lslamiyya (Egyptian Islamic Jihad, EIJ) in Egypt and Abu Sayyaf 
in the Philippines. Money also went to causes "with hard-line or extremist elements like 
the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan or Hamas in the Gaza . . . The Saudi 
government did not begin to properly analyze or control the flow of its funds to 
movements like the Taliban and extremist groups in South Asia, Central Asia, and the 
rest of the world until 1998. " [551 The flow of charitable funds from Saudi businessmen 
and even from royal officials was apportioned with remarkable carelessness and little 
attention paid to the recipients, their objectives, or end use. Accountability and valuation 
were either deficient or ignored. Thus, Muslim charities had inadvertently created 
pipelines through which cash flowed to transform ragtag bands of insurgents and 
jihadists "into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions. "[56] During 
the 1990s Islamist organizations had collected between $300 million and $500 million, 
most of it from Saudi charities and private donors. "Saudi donors alone reportedly 
moved $150 million through Islamic aid organizations to Bosnia in 1994 alone. "157] 



Al Haramain Islamic Foundation 

In November 2002 representatives of 241 Saudi Arabian charities, including 23 
women's organizations and 23 private foundations, met in Riyadh. Their combined 
revenue was estimated at SR1.2 billion ($320 million) with expenditures of some SR970 
million ($260 million) annually. Dr. Ali bin Ibrahim al-Namlah, Minister of Labour and 
Social Affairs, announced that the kingdom, in fact, had recorded "264 charitable 
organizations for helping the poor" with assets "worth SR2.6 billion [$550 million]." Most 
of this revenue came from wealthy private donors performing sadaqa or zakat, but 
Shaykh Saleh al-Hosain, General President of Affairs for the Grand Mosque and the 
Prophet's Mosque, reported that "the state provides a generous financial assistance to 



charitable societies at the time of their establishment, in addition to an annual aid of 80 
percent of their total expenditures. It also meets nearly 80 percent of the cost of 
constructing the headquarters of charities. " 1581 Most of these charities were indeed 
committed to assisting the destitute, supporting education, health, and refugees, and 
furthering Islam by da\va and the construction of mosques. Some of these charities, 
knowingly or not, came to support terrorism and its organizations, but perhaps the most 
notorious of the larger Islamic charities was the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHIF). 

With headquarters in Riyadh, AHIF was founded in 1988 as a branch of MWL at its 
22nd Session in Mecca. Endorsed by the Saudi royal family and supervised by the 
Ministry of Religious Affairs, AHIF, like IIRO, was to "provide relief and aid to Muslims 
as peoples and groups wherever they are, should they face disasters endangering their 
being, their religious beliefs or their freedom." Although it spent large sums to promote 
the radical Islamist agenda, it nonetheless achieved considerable respect for building 
and restoring mosques and in constructing and funding Quranic schools in 
impoverished villages. It has printed nearly 15 million copies of Islamic books, 
established more than 1,100 mosques, schools, and centers, and has dispatched more 
than 3,000 "missionaries" to spread Islam abroad. [591 There were, however, more 
sinister motives, for after its founding in 1988 one of its express commitments became 
financial assistance to the Islamists in Afghanistan, and from there AHIF soon extended 
its support for Islamists in other countries. By the year 2000 AHIF maintained forty 
branches in Saudi Arabia with a Zakat Account, account number 6/98998, and an Alms 
Account, account number 2/9292, well known to most Saudis. It had offices in some 
fifty countries including those countries where mujahideen were involved in jihad: 
Albania, Croatia, Kosovo, and Macedonia in the Balkans; Pakistan and Bangladesh in 
South Asia: Kenya and Somalia in Africa; and Georgia and Azerbaijan in the former 
Soviet Union. It was sponsoring 3,000 imams and da\va activists living abroad and 
maintaining four computer internet sites. American and Saudi investigators later 
estimated that the Foundation generated about $50 million a year for the mujahideen, 
which included substantial funds for Al Qaeda. 

Although the Foundation had been active in the Balkans during the 1990s, AHIF and 
the mysterious United Aid Committee of Kosovo and Chechnya began to finance the 
construction of mosques, schools, and terrorism soon after the Muslim revolt in 
Chechnya. Consequently, in 1999 the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) openly 
accused AHIF of wiring funds to Chechen militants using as a false front a branch 
office of the Foundation for Chechnya. Located in Baku, it worked directly with 
mujahideen active in the Chechen Republic and with "Wahhabi extremists" operating in 
Makhach-Qala, the capital of the Dagestan Republic, and its second-largest city, 
Buinaksk. In the same year AHIF established a "Foundation Regarding Chechnya" in 
Azerbaijan to provide direct support to Chechen terrorists. It was closed by the 
government in January 2000 "for serious violations of the law," only to reopen, and then 
was permanently closed after 9/11. 1601 The Foundation for Chechnya employed 
twenty-five agents in regions bordering Chechnya who were responsible for securing 
supply routes for Chechen military units. AHIF employees Abd al-Latif bin Abd al-Karim 
al-Daraan and Abu Omar Mohammed al-Seif directed operations from mujahideen 
headquarters inside Chechnya, while other Foundation members were scattered 
throughout Chechnya with the Chechen insurgents. Abu Seif was both a member of the 
majlis al-shura, the consultative council of Al Qaeda, and its representative to AHIF. 
Before he was killed in October 2002, he was the conduit through which "the financing 



of the Chechen fighters was exercised " 1611 

When the Saudi government made its first feeble attempt in 1993 to control the 
end-use of charitable funds for mujahideen organizations in Afghanistan, a law was 
issued requiring that all donations collected by Muslim charities be deposited in a fund 
administered by a Saudi prince. It soon proved to be unenforceable, a fact that later 
became an embarrassment to important members of the royal family .[62] Although there 
was now no doubt that the Bosnian and Somali branches of AHIF were linked to terrorist 
funding, for more than a decade AHIF was exempt from investigation, apparently 
because of its close ties to the royal family. The Bosnia office supplied funds for the 
Jama'at al-lslamiyya of Egypt, which the USA declared a terrorist organization on 2 
November 2001 , and it was a signatory to the 23 February 1998 fatwa (an opinion on an 
Islamic legal or religious matter) of Osama bin Laden that targeted Americans and their 
allies. In Africa the Somali office had been even more active. Some of its employees 
were members of Al Itihad al-lslamiyya (AIAI), a Somali terrorist organization closely 
linked to Al Qaeda. Salaries for the employees and a steady supply of funds were 
funneled through the Al Barakaat Bank, the same institution that provided financial 
intelligence and money transfers for Osama bin Laden. AHIF funds to AIAI were 
invariably disguised as donations for the construction of mosques and orphanages, but 
were used to facilitate the activities of the mujahideen in Somalia, including travel to 
Saudi Arabia. 

On 7 November 2001 the USA, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle East states froze the 
bank's assets.[63J AHIF reacted with outrage. Its Director-General, Shaykh Uqayl bin 
Abdul Aziz al-Uqayl (aka Aqeel al-Aqeel) issued a labia condemning cooperation with 
the "infidel." For months he had dismissed the charges that Saudi charities offered 
funds and assistance to parties linked to political or terrorist activities as "mere 
speculation." After the Bosnian and Somali branches were designated by both the US 
and Saudi governments as supporters of terrorism in March 2002, Uqayl al-Uqayl stated 
that in the aftermath of 9/11 lawyers had no evidence to convict AHIF in a $1 trillion 
lawsuit brought against it and other Saudi-based charities by 900 family members of 
those killed in the 9/11 attack. Al-Uqayl protested that the lawsuit was a "futile exercise." 
US Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, thought otherwise. "The branches of 
Al-Haramain that we have singled out today," he claimed, "not only assist in the pursuit 
of death and destruction, they deceive countless people around the world who believe 
that they have helped spread good will and good works. " [64] In defiance AHIF 
reconstituted its Bosnian office, but after a series of raids by local security agents it 
once again was closed down in December 2003. Although Shaykh Uqayl denied any 
pressure from his government or the Americans, AHIF decided to close its offices in 
Albania, Croatia, and Ethiopia in May 2003, to be followed by those in Kenya, Tanzania, 
Pakistan, and Indonesia - where, however, its large headquarters were put up for rent 
but quietly "moved to a smaller house down the block. " 1651 When Shaykh Uqayl 
announced in October 2003 that AHIF was still active in seventy-four countries and 
indiscreetly mentioned that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah had recently sent a check for 
an unreported sum of money, he was promptly sacked and replaced by his deputy, 
Dabbas al-Dabbas. In January 2004 the UN officially added AHIF to its list of 
organizations whose assets were to be blocked for suspected ties to Al Qaeda and 
invoked a ban on travel and an arms embargo pursuant to United Nations Security 
Council Resolutions 1267, 1390, and 1455. 

Although the AHIF/US won a dubious victory in September 2003 when it forced the 



Washington Times to apologize for a false statement that it had been included in the list 
of institutions involved in possible terrorist attacks, the retraction did not deter federal 
agents from searching its Ashland headquarters in Oregon in February 2004. Although 
the charity's lawyer claimed the office had not received funds from Riyadh, in April 
2004 the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the US Attorney's Office for the 
District of Oregon initiated a search of "property purchased" on behalf of the 
Foundation pursuant to a "criminal investigation into possible violations of the Internal 
Revenue Code, the Money Laundering Control Act, and the Bank Secrecy Act." 
Simultaneously, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 
blocked accounts of AHIF, Inc. to insure the preservation of its assets pending further 
OFAC investigation. In February 2005 the AHIF was indicted in the US District Court for 
Oregon. Charges were preferred against Soliman al-Buthe, the AHIF international 
treasurer and Saudi entrepreneur who in 1997 had helped establish the Al Haramain 
office in Oregon. [661 

Despite earlier denials by Prince Salman that "if some individuals have been 
attempting to turn charitable work into evil acts, the Kingdom cannot be held 
responsible," or statements by the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Ali al-Namlah, 
that "we directly supervise the activities of charitable organizations within the 
Kingdom . . . and we are not responsible for their activities abroad," there was no longer 
any doubt that certain Saudi charities had been and were still involved in funding 
international terrorism. [671 



World Assembly of Muslim Youth 

The last of the three major charities to receive substantial funding from and through the 
Saudi royal family was the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with its 
headquarters in Riyadh. WAMY was founded in 1972 as a Saudi effort to prevent the 
"corrupting" ideas of the West influencing young Muslims. It was an independent 
international organization and an Islamic forum to support the work of Muslims and 
needy communities worldwide. Like other Saudi charitable organizations WAMY was to 
recruit and educate Muslims, specifically the young, to build schools and mosques, 
initiate social welfare projects, and provide disaster relief. Saleh al-Shaykh, Saudi 
Minister of Islamic Affairs, was not only Chairman of the WAMY secretariat but also 
Chairman of the Administrative Council of AHIF. At the time of 9/1 1 the Assembly had 
offices in some fifty-five countries and global associate membership in over 500 youth 
organizations. Like other charities it would hold annual international conferences where 
impassioned speeches were the norm and where in recent years Muslim youth have 
been urged to combat "propaganda" linking Islam with terrorism. The importance of 
these international conferences is often overlooked To the cynic they are thought to be 
an excuse for a holiday, but the annual conferences of Islamic charities have been 
critically important in bringing together Muslims and Islamists from Morocco to 
Indonesia, Central Asia, and Sri Lanka. For those members seriously concerned about 
the humanitarian activities of the Assembly, the annual conference was more social than 
conspiratorial. WAMY had been especially interested in narcotics trafficking and drug 
use among Muslim youth, and held international conferences in those countries where 
that problem was either acute or threatened soon to be. [681s For the young militant 
Islamists, however, these international conferences were an inspirational opportunity to 



meet other angry young Muslims, define objectives, and devise whatever means 
necessary to achieve them. The annual conferences of the WAMY were no exception. 

The first branch of WAMY in the USA was established by Abdullah bin Laden, the 
nephew of Osama bin Laden, and was widely known for the literature it published to 
promote da\va, Islamic jihad, and hatred of the Jews. WAMY Canada managed a series 
of Islamic camps and sponsored pilgrimages for the youth. A branch office was located 
in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, but was supervised by the WAMY office in the 
USA. 1691 In the USA Fadil Suliman, the Muslim chaplain at the American University in 
Washington DC, was a director of WAMY USA, and in Britain Dr. Farid Elshayyal, the 
respected Chairman of the Muslim Investment Corporation of the UK, member of the 
Center for International Policy Studies in London, and the former Chairman of the 
Muslim Association of Britain, was a founding member of WAMY. Nevertheless, there 
appears to have been a dark undercurrent that flowed through WAMY in the UK, and 
after 9/11 the open challenge presented by terrorism produced an awareness that "as 
long as 10 years ago" WAMY had been used "as a discreet channel for public and 
private Saudi donations to hard-line Islamic organisations. " [701 

In the USA there was suspicion among federal authorities that WAMY had been 
funding terrorists since 1996, and after 1999 the FBI began a continuing investigation of 
its activities. By 2003 Operation Green Quest, the US government's multi-agency 
investigating money-laundering in support of terrorist organizations, scrutinized the 
operations of MWL, IIRO, and WAMY only to conclude that the activities of WAMY did 
not constitute a threat to the USA despite demands from several senators that its offices 
be closed. Indeed, the Director of WAMY announced plans to open offices in New 
Zealand, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia to add to the fifty-nine countries in which it 
already worked, and expected to publish French and Spanish editions of its monthly 
magazine, Muslim Youth WAMY continued to offer the traditional Ramadan iftar 
(fast-breaking) meals for Muslims in forty countries, and in October 2003 it inaugurated 
an outreach program to assist poor and needy people during the Ramadan season that 
included Islamic and Islamist "educational and cultural activities before and after the 
meals."[721 



Al Wafa Humanitarian Foundation 

Although there are a dozen major and visible charities that maintain offices outside 
Saudi Arabia there are also a number of very small Saudi charities whose provenance 
is obscure and whose activities are often known only to the donors. Before, but 
particularly after, 9/11, the infiltration of the large public Saudi charities by terrorists 
became increasingly revealed by their operations in foreign countries monitored by 
national security agencies and the elaborate international investigation of terrorist 
financing networks that was spearheaded by OFAC of the US Treasury. This was not 
the case for those small private charities in Saudi Arabia, usually founded by wealthy 
individuals, ostensibly for humanitarian purposes, that could support mujahideen and 
jihad undetected. Needless to say, there were many wealthy Arabs who were eager to 
assist the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan and were quite sympathetic to the 
violent Afghan-Arab warriors, whom they would in normal circumstances regard with 
suspicion if not distaste. Moreover, it was very difficult for Arabs, particularly those in 



Saudi Arabia who were living in the very comfortable circumstances of their wealth, to 
resist the deep Islamic belief in charitable giving through zakat and sadaqa that could 
easily be diverted from humanitarianism to terrorism. 

The dramatic increase in the fortunes of many Saudis, directly or indirectly, from oil 
revenues in the 1970s and 1980s also spawned the creation of innumerable waqf 
charitable trusts. Consequently, it seems likely that the mysterious Al Wafa 
Humanitarian Foundation (Wafa al-lgatha al-lslamiyya) of Saudi Arabia may have 
originally been established as a waqf khayr. Al Wafa, which is usually translated as 
"fidelity and justice," was one of the most malevolent organizations that Saudi money 
funded along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Headquartered in Saudi Arabia, it maintained 
unobtrusive offices and mail drops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and Pakistan. Its 
operations remain virtually unknown, but it was commonly believed in Peshawar to have 
had support from some of the wealthiest Saudi families. During Taliban rule in 
Afghanistan it served as a reliable supporter of the Al Qaeda network. [731 

When President Bush signed his Executive Order on 23 September 2001 freezing 
assets in the USA of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) that aided, abetted, 
and supported international terrorism, Al Wafa had the distinction of being first on the 
list. A US official described the charity as one that does "a small amount of legitimate 
humanitarian work and raise[s] a lot of money for equipment and weapons . . . [and 
that] Abdul Aziz, a senior Al Qaeda operative and Saudi citizen, used al-Wafa to 
finance terrorist activities. " [741 The UN would soon follow the lead of the USA and freeze 
all Al Wafa international assets, impose a ban on travel, and enforce an arms embargo. 
The Council of Foreign Relations reported in October 2002 that Al Wafa carried out 
"legitimate work as well as financing more suspect groups," but it was also ominously 
supporting the Pakistani nuclear scientific establishment. [751 In Pakistan a mysterious 
Shaykh Abu Abdul Aziz Naqai was supposedly the head of Al Wafa and closely 
associated with Al Qaeda. Attempts to unravel Al Wafa were made more difficult by the 
fact that it is a common name widely applied to numerous legitimate organizations, 
health centers, and hotels. There was an Al Wafa Women's Charity Association in 
Saudi Arabia. The Al Aqsa Foundation of South Africa supported the Al Wafa 
Charitable Society and the Al Wafa hospital in Palestine, and the Al Wafa Rehabilitation 
and Health Center was active in Gaza. Al Wafa institutions were often confused with 
WAFA, the official Palestine news agency. There was a large Al Wafa center for the 
mentally ill in Bahrain, Al Wafa Hotels in Aden and Marrakech, an Al Wafa Pharmacy in 
Tripoli, and the Al Wafa Scrap Copper Recycling Company in Cairo. 

After the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2002 the coalition forces carried 
out an investigation of the Al Wafa premises in Kabul's Wazir Ajkbar Khan district. 
There they found a laboratory with explosives, fuses, "terroristic guide books," and 
documents that "showed links between Al Wafa, Al Qaeda and the Taliban." Later 
additional documentation about Al Wafa was uncovered at the abandoned Abu Khabab 
Al Qaeda camp outside Jalalabad Three laboratories under suspicion had been 
purchased earlier in 2001 by "the Wafa Humanitarian Organization" and their 
equipment "shipped from the United Arab Emirates to Afghanistan. " [761 

Al Wafa remains an enigma to this day. In 2002 US officials were outspoken that 
Saudi Arabia was "glossing over the terrorist connections of other humanitarian 
organizations, including the Al Wafa Humanitarian Organization, IIRO, and its parent, 
the Muslim World League. " [771 There was no reported disclosure by the Saudi 



government, if they knew, of those wealthy Saudis providing funds for Al Wafa.[78] The 
government of Kuwait denied the existence of any organization called the Al Wafa 
Humanitarian Organization. There had been an A Wafa Humanitarian Organization 
ostensibly operating in Mogadishu, but it used a post office box address in Dubai. Al 
Wafa also seems to have had an office on the sixth floor of International House in 
Nairobi, but in 2004 no one seemed to know if it was still active. Unregulated banks in 
the Cayman Islands were suspected of assisting Al Wafa, but no banks or financial 
institutions were ever made public. Investigators found an Al Wafa humanitarian group 
operating in Kurdistan, but there was no relationship with the Al Wafa that operated in 
Afghanistan. Finally, there was the report that one Abdul Aziz, a Saudi citizen and an 
important Al Qaeda "financial official" captured in Afghanistan and held in the US prison 
at Guantanamo, allegedly tunneled "large sums of money" to Osama bin Laden through 
Al Wafa, "a Persian Gulf charity" whose purported mission was to feed and provide 
medical aid to the poor in Afghanistan. [79] The US government was not ready to publish 
its findings regarding the Saudi Al Wafa Humanitarian Organization or why it was 
placed on the list of sanctions by the administration in the days following 9/11. 
Nonetheless, it is likely that from its inception Al Wafa was an Al Qaeda front and its 
charitable interests a disguise for its terrorist purposes. 



Benevolence International Foundation 

In 1987 the wealthy Saudi Shaykh Adil Galil Abdul Batargy (aka Battargee) founded 
the Islamic Benevolence Committee (IBC; Lajnat al-Birr al-lslamiyya, LBI) in Jidda and 
Peshawar as a charity to assist the destitute and infirm and provide meals during 
Ramadan. In fact, its principal resources were publicly committed to support the 
mujahideen fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Its banking relationships were 
impeccable, including accounts with the National Commercial Bank (NCB), Saudi 
American Bank, Al Riyadh Bank, Al Rahji Banking and Investment Corporation, and the 
National Arab Bank. In the following year Muhammad Jamal Khalifa of Jidda, the 
brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, founded in the Philippines a separate export-import 
company, the Benevolence International Corporation (BIC), whose publicly stated 
purpose was also to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. It acted as a front for 
Muslim separatists in the Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Group. [80] In 1992 Batargy's IBC 
amalgamated with the BIC creating a Saudi charity, the Benevolence International 
Foundation (BIF). The Foundation claimed that its purpose was to provide humanitarian 
assistance to those afflicted by natural disasters, but in fact it had both a public and a 
private agenda. Suleman Ahmer, a member of the BIF board of directors, drew the 
distinction between relief and da\ia, between humanitarian assistance and the mission 
to make Islam supreme throughout the world. BIF was not simply a relief agency, but a 
da\va organization to spread Wahhabism actively throughout the Muslim and western 
worlds. Taking care of people in distress was subsidiary. In 1999 its "Mission 
Statement" was quite candid that the purpose of BIF was to make "Islam supreme on 
this earth." 

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan the principal objective of BIF was to 
demonstrate the power of Islam by an attack in the USA. It moved its headquarters to 
Plantation, Florida. As a non-profit charitable trust it solicited funds from wealthy 
American Muslims. Abdul Batargy selected as the American Director of the Foundation 



Enaam M. Arnaout (aka Abu Mahmoud al-Suri). Arnaout had lived in Afghanistan, 
worked with Osama bin Laden, and was perfectly familiar with the aims and operations 
of MAK on the eastern Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands. He had first found 
employment in Afghanistan with MWL, and then with IBC, where his abilities came to 
the attention of Abdul Batargy. In 1988 Arab News published a photograph of Arnaout 
and Bin Laden together in the "al-Masada" mujahideen camp in Afghanistan. Upon 
arrival in the USA he married an American woman, obtained American citizenship, and 
moved the headquarters of BIF to Chicago in 1993 where he recruited Jose Padilla and 
others for Al Qaeda and began to construct the infrastructure and offices in Canada, 
the Benevolence International Fund, and in Bosnia, the Bosanska Idealna Futura, to 
support mujahideen activity in the Balkans and Chechnya. When the BIF (Bosanska 
Idealna Futura) office in Sarajevo, Bosnia, was searched by Bosnian authorities and US 
agents in March 2002, they discovered a "treasure trove" of electrically scanned 
documents, photographs, and computer disks with photographs of Arnaout and Bin 
Laden together. Personal letters between the two were also found, including a 
handwritten note by Bin Laden authorizing Arnaout to sign documents on his behalf. 

Late in 1994 Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, who had founded BIC, met with the BIF 
President Mohammed Loay Bayazid in the USA. Bayazid, a Syrian-American, had lived 
in Kansas City and sojourned in the guesthouse of Osama bin Laden in a fashionable 
suburb of Khartoum, before moving to Chicago in 1994. Having received 
communications from the Philippines that Khalifa was funding Operation Bojinka, a 
terrorist plot that was foiled on 6 January 1995, the FBI arrested both Khalifa and 
Bayazid in Mountain View, California, in December. The following January Dr. Ayman 
al-Zawahiri, leader of El J and one of the founders of Al Qaeda and confidant of Osama 
bin Laden, arrived in Santa Clara on a fundraising trip, where he stayed with Al Qaeda 
operatives closely tied to BIF. In May 1995 Khalifa was deported to Jordan, where he 
was acquitted by a Jordanian court and sought refuge in Saudi Arabia. Bayazid was 
subsequently released for lack of evidence and promptly disappeared. [811 

BIF was soon operating with associated offices in Bosnia, Chechnya, Pakistan, China, 
Ingushetia, and Russia. In Chechnya it supported Saif al-lslam al-Masri, a member of 
the majlis al-shura of Al Qaeda, and employed him in the BIF office in Chechnya. In 
1999 a memorial for a BIF employee killed in Tajikistan wrote that he was the "9th officer 
to die in the line of duty since 1992," a rather significant rate of mortality for any 
charity. Arnaout also used Alaa al-Saadawi, a fundraiser who frequented mosques in 
New York and New Jersey, to move money out of the USA, as much as $650,000 in 
2000-2001. 1821 After 9/11 the massive search for terrorists and their organizations 
soon focused on Arnaout and BIF. A search of his home and office convinced US 
officials that the Foundation was not just a charity to "help those afflicted by wars," but 
in fact a front to launder and send money to Osama bin Laden to purchase rockets, 
mortars, rifles, dynamite, and bombs for members of Al Qaeda. On 19 November BIF 
was declared a terrorist organization, its Chicago office closed, and in February 2003 
Enaam Arnaout pleaded guilty to working with Al Qaeda, but in a plea bargain the 
government agreed to drop its charges in return for information. 



Riyadh bombings and Saudi Arabian charities 



Throughout the 1990s Israel had pressed Washington to crack down on US-based 
Islamic organizations that were providing aid to Palestinian HAMAS and Hizbullah. The 
Clinton administration, which had been reluctant to initiate investigations of any Islamic 
charities that could precipitate charges of religious bigotry and accusations of ethnic 
discrimination, or raise constitutional questions, refused to act. Consequently, when US 
officials visited the Persian Gulf states in January 2000 with a list of more than thirty 
Islamic charities thought to have links to terrorism, only two were based in the USA. 
Specific charities were discussed at some length, but the talks were followed by months 
of delay and drift that lasted well after 9/1 1 . [831 

After 9/1 1 , however, the Saudi government could no longer ignore US diplomatic and 
political pressure to provide information on the charities of Saudi Arabia, governmental 
and private In December 2002 the government announced in Riyadh that all Saudi 
charities were to be "subject to extensive audits to ensure that the funds provided by 
donors are used for their intended purposes. In addition, charities whose activities 
extend beyond Saudi Arabia's borders must now report and coordinate their activities 
with the Foreign Ministry " To ensure compliance, the government established a High 
Commission "for oversight of all chanties." The Saudi government still had not reached a 
point where it could "track all donations to and from the charities," but promised such a 
development so that the "combined changes will substantially decrease its charitable 
sector's vulnerability to abuse by evil-doers. "[84] 

Although Saudi officials began to cooperate ever more closely with European and US 
agents on the trail of terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda, the Saudis appear to have 
regarded the threat from terrorism as a peculiarly American concern until 12 May 2003, 
known as 5/12, when suicide bombers blew up a residential compound in Riyadh. The 
deaths and destruction shook the kingdom just as badly as 9/1 1 had done in the USA, 
and brought home to the royal family and its intelligence services that they too were not 
immune from terrorists. The Saudi government reacted with unexpected vigor. Hundreds 
of mujahideen, who had lived in Saudi Arabia for years, were rounded up, interrogated, 
and many placed under arrest. Some 2,000 radical clerics were purged from mosques, 
and warnings were issued among the clerical establishment that the rhetoric of jihad 
would not be tolerated. Their hitherto strident calls for jihad from the sanctity of the 
mosque did indeed become more mellifluous, but "what we are hearing is only a facade. 
You can smell the disgust they feel in mouthing their new rhetoric. " [851 

Several days after the Riyadh suicide bombings a firestorm of debate pitting 
"conservatives" against "liberals" erupted in the Saudi media. At issue was the role that 
the Saudi education system might have played in the emergence of terrorism in the 
country. Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed, the "liberal" editor of the London-based Saudi daily 
Al Sharq Al Awsat, used an acerbic wit to counter the argument that Saudis could not 
possibly be involved in such atrocities. Using biting sarcasm to pillory the Saudi 
establishment. al-Rashed wrote: 



I also discovered that the Saudis who went to Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Chechnya 
arrived there by chance: they were tourists who had lost their way ... It isn't true that 
the Saudi media and institutions prepared the ground and the mentality for them . . . 
The charity organizations sent the money only for their tourism and entertainment 



and that of their Arab and Muslim friends, and not for funding terrorism abroad 
You must not connect what I said with any bombings heard in your city [Riyadh]; it is 
only fireworks and American propaganda. 

[86] 



Stung by the growing criticism the government declared it was taking "unprecedented 
measures" designed to exert "stricter control on charity associations, and at the same 
time, to guarantee that donors' aids are reaching the rightful beneficiaries." Ostensibly, 
these measures were to prohibit charities from distributing funds directly to 
beneficiaries by processing charitable donations through banks that would verify the 
identity of the donor and the recepient.[87] 

Cooperation with the Europeans and the Americans, which had been haphazard at 
best, now became more earnest. A joint Saudi/US task force to combat the financing of 
global terrorism was established, and the government imposed stiff scrutiny and 
restrictions on funds moving out of Saudi Arabia. In addition, an agency was created to 
coordinate the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia and the USA that provided for the 
"real-time" exchange of information. An unknown number of terrorists captured in Saudi 
Arabia were turned over to the USA, and three Saudis, who had assisted the Pakistan 
Lashkar-e-Toiba and were wanted for trial in the USA, were extradited. Saudi charities, 
however, remained virtually immune, for Saudi officials claimed they did not have the 
evidence required by Saudi law to close them down even if it were possible, which was 
doubtful, and the USA would have to be content with the occasional dismissal of some 
administrative head of a charity. The kingdom would handle its problem its own way. It 
would have to. In January 2003 the Arab Human Rights Committee convened a Paris 
Conference on Humanitarian and Charitable Societies. Considered the "first of its kind," 
the meeting brought together UN agencies, NGOs, and Islamic charities. The 
conference was devoted, inter alia, to the impact of globalization on charities. In 
addition, the performance of international Islamic societies was evaluated, as was their 
ability to meet humanitarian needs in times of war and peace. Hardly apolitical, the 
conference preparatory statement argued that 9/11 was a "catastrophe," and that from 
that event forward the issue of Islamic charities had "changed from just mere 
harassment into unprecedented actual war [by the United States) against all societies of 
Islamic traits."[88] In August 2003, Saudi Arabia finally agreed to join the independent 
Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in Paris consisting of twenty-nine countries, largely 
organized by the USA, to adopt strict new regulations to interdict terrorist financing. In 
the months that followed the Saudis froze $5.7 million in questionable funds - that 
appeared more symbolic than real, for 150 other countries had frozen more than $112 
million in terrorist assets worldwide since 9/1 1 . Nevertheless the Saudi government did 
block the assets of the Al Haramain Foundation offices in Somalia, Bosnia, Kenya, 
Tanzania, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It also promised to prohibit mosques, schools, and 
commercial firms from collecting contributions in cash. Saudi charities were ordered to 
cease all transmittals of cash overseas, and there were even discussions that Saudi 
charities would be prohibited from operating offices abroad. 

Despite these declarations against terrorism, the counter-terrorism policies of the 
Saudi government remained insufficient and required extensive reform. The State 
Department sought to modulate the criticism of its vital ally in the Middle East by praising 
the kingdom's domestic crackdown following the Riyadh bombing. Deputy Secretary of 



State Richard Armitage declared that Saudi cooperation on those matters "internal to 
Saudi Arabia has been magnificent" but many were not so sure. The split between 
traditionalists and reformers in Saudi Arabia continued to grow. Although there was a 
desire to maintain contact with the western world for the sake of material wealth, many 
Saudis believe that all westerners and non-Muslims are infidels. Whether "conservative" 
or "liberal," however, both 9/11 and 5/12 ironically stimulated an increase in Islamic 
charitable activities in Saudi Arabia. Despite the misuse of Islamic charities to promote 
terrorism, the same official Saudi relief organizations that were under investigation after 
5/12 entered Iraq in 2003 shortly after the US-led coalition forces had captured 
Baghdad. IIRO was praised in the Saudi daily Al-Watan (The Nation) for its "relief work" 
in the Sunni triangle of Iraq. Undoubtedly, Muslim generosity has been manipulated, 
even in Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi donors blessed the militant activity and felt compelled 
to assist Islamist radicals as long as their generosity remained unknown. The 
subterranean movement of charitable funds within Saudi Arabia itself finally struck home 
in 2004 after an indigenous Al Qaeda cell was infiltrated. Captured radicals appeared on 
Saudi television and acknowledged that they had used funds from two charities to 
purchase weapons used in attacks within the kingdom. That shocking development was 
soon followed by the appearance of the WAMY director general on Saudi television, 
and in a speech he declared that new guidelines were being issued to protect 
donations. Citizens were assured that they should have no fear that charitable funds 
could be used to arm radical organizations such as Al Qaeda, and the promise was 
made that investigations of Saudi charities within the kingdom would continue. 



Chapter 3 The banks 



Even the little we know about fundraising shows us al-Qaeda is not an organization 
run by one man but a global Islamist Internet, with gateways and access points 
around the world. It has a worldwide operational reach and is better-run financially 
than many companies you find on the Stock Exchange. 

A London banking expert, The Times, London, 25 September 2001 



As I have said many times, you can't bomb a foreign bank account. 

Kenneth W. Dam, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 8 June 2002 



Golden Chain 

The most startling and important document discovered during the raid by US security 
agents on the Bosnian office of BIF (Bosanska Idealna Futura) in Sarajevo in March 
2002 was a computer disk labeled Tarikh Osama ("Osama's history"). It chronicled both 
the activities of Osama bin Laden and MAK in Afghanistan and the subsequent creation 
of the Al Qaeda organization. The file also contained a list of twenty wealthy donors 
known within Al Qaeda as the Golden Chain. Among the names were seven individuals 
who gave their considerable donations to Osama bin Laden personally. [89] In Islam the 
Golden Chain has a much deeper meaning than precious metal. Hadith scholars have 
long declared that the "golden chain" defined the progression of prophets from Adam 
through Muhammad, the last Prophet, and among Sufi Muslims the chain (silsila) 
represented the succession of one spiritual master (murshid) to another in a Sufi order 
or brotherhood (tariqa). The twenty supporters of Al Qaeda consisted of six bankers, 
twelve businessmen, and two persons unknown. The net worth of the eighteen was 
estimated at $85 billion, or approximately 42 percent of the Saudi Arabian gross 
domestic product (GDP) in 2002. All of them supported charities of one kind or another, 
and several had founded their own. [901 Al the bankers in the Golden Chain were major 
principals in the National Commercial Bank (NCB), Al Riyadh Bank, and the Al Rajhi 
Banking and Investment Corporation, Saudi Arabia's three largest banks. 
Table 3. 1 The Golden Chain 



. Knc 




Sulanun jI K11J1U 


Al Ha-.hid Tradinu and C'oniftKUnc. Riyadh 


AKIvl QkIct llokn 


Chkl Iwauuvv OltKrr. Bakri Onup. Iidda 


Pin Ludcn bun Inn 


Saudi tun I.Ucn Group 


Yi'iiul Lun-vl 


Abdul l.akvl lamed Group 


Ibtuhim Muhammad Abtih 


Irn lla< loundaivm: Al Aland) 1 jiahlnbincni: 




Alncan Citnpany-Sudan: Al Amoudi Group 


Salvh Abdullah Kjmcl 


llallah Al Itaraka: Al Snamal Mamie Rank l.trdan 




Mamie Hint: Dank jiUj'ip: Ikrua Iniciruuonal 






Suleiman A. jil-Rii|hi 


Al 1' iiln li.nl iii.' .ml In...- mum i ' iip : iin n 


AU-hainnioJ Abdullah al luniaih 


hi-.i I- 1 Km. hr.c-.unini Hank 


Abdullah man al-Sharhiik- 


Al Kiv.tdh Rant; R-.im Hiv.ilh IVuik: l*.D>~piun 




Gull Punt: MiMk* llii'i i -ipml Group 


.M.luinnusl Vouitl al NjeIii 


AIN-nhi Ifi.nlimO-.. lUJa 


KIijUiI hin AUhVu/ 






IV.*I-)»im» Iviundnuon 


AKJel <J*l*i 1 jinh 


Punt Al lima: AUtla i-iimimi'ii Il'ii I'.i.- 




loundauon: Si«Ja Group 


SaluhalDinAhdcl UuJ 


I'niivJ 'lull InJiniiw; QcneB) ALilim? Aun.ici 


Ahmad 1 in h ■■'■l i Yamani 


launder. Invir.u-i p: Saudi liit.pvan Hank 


AliM i liili liilivi 


liihri i iiMiipt Arali t ".>inp.inv I.i Hitch: Siiuli 




I'W-'pniit Rank 


Ahmed ul-llarN 


Ahmed ni l Ijihi ll.iihiit: Ahnu<d ill larhi Group 


Mohammad alduai 


Saudi RncuiUi and ALirkcunc Company: Arab 






Hamad al-lluwuni 


Akl TruJm^r.^pim*;AllliMinrri4Ca 




liihlbh 5. QuieiiuueDl I/'iJjmuiv IV>ller Supporunii 


inc.- AdmnUhiliiv ol Conconipirj 


in 1 SHbnnBO, t'SA v. An**wt. United Sum Onirvi 


Ciuii. N'.Tihtf n Puirici il Ohm 


U, 9 lanuory 2<IUi. 



Al Qaeda had successfully penetrated the official Saudi banking sector, and members 
of that loosely knit organization were able to transfer their funds throughout the world 
with relative ease before 9/11. The financial manager for Bin Laden until 1996 testified 
that Al Qaeda had "lots" of money in a web of bank accounts in Europe, Asia, and 
Africa. In the Sudan Bin Laden maintained a personal account at the Al Shamal Islamic 
Bank, and opened accounts in three other banks in Khartoum under other names. 
There were also accounts "in Hong Kong and Malaysia and at Barclays Bank in 
London. " [911 Almost a decade later the FBI would confirm that the terrorist Mohamed 
Atta, who piloted one of the commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center, "wired 
money to Mr. bin Laden's former paymaster in Sudan, Shaykh Said al-Masri [aka 
Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad] on the eve of the terrorist attacks. " [92] "Tens of millions of 
the $100 million" with which Bin Laden had provided the Taliban since he had arrived in 
Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996 was "directly traced to Bin Laden entities through 
banking and other transfers. " [931 

When a team of American officials visited Riyadh in June 1999 to discuss the 
problems of tracking the financial transactions of Saudi charitable and financial 
institutions, they were alarmed to learn that Saudi officials seemed generally ignorant 
and surprised that there was a problem regulating these accounts. Worse, "Saudi police 
and bank regulators had never worked together before and didn't particularly want to 
start." [941 When Saudi Arabia made no effort to change its banking practices a second 
task force headed by OFAC of the US Treasury paid a visit to Riyadh in January 2000. 
The Treasury officials received tea but little sympathy for their appeals to the Saudis to 
reform their banking regulations. 



Investigating the banks 



Immediately after 9/11, the US government moved quickly to establish a legal 
framework to investigate terrorist financial infrastructure. Names and locations of 
financial institutions through which terrorist organizations banked and moved their 
money were published. Thus, the USA was the first to launch a determined effort to 
"follow the money" in order to halt the movement of terrorist funds; other major banking 
nations were slow to follow. Privacy was valued more than safety. Assets were blocked 
and regulations were established by executive order under the International Emergency 
Economic Powers Act that enabled US financial institutions to freeze foreign terrorist 
accounts. Three months later the EU issued similar regulations, but many difficulties had 
already surfaced. The world of international finance had become incredibly 
complicated. Bank secrecy, wire transfers, the myriad of transactions, automated teller 
machines (ATMs), and the ease and convenience of modern banking could just as 
readily be exploited by terrorists as legitimate users. The transfer of money could also 
be disguised by moving small amounts from a variety of sources, and while banking in 
the USA, Europe, and the Pacific Rim might benefit "both from the presence and the 
use of sophisticated regulatory laws," the "contrary occurred in the Middle East, Africa, 
Southeast Asia, and the former Soviet bloc. "[95] 

In the aftermath of 9/11 the international regulatory community was forced to 
reexamine its standards. The USA was the first to act. On 24 September OFAC 
publicized the names of thirty-nine people and organizations on its list of Specially 
Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) whose assets must be "blocked immediately." On 
the list were Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi, Saad al-Sharif, Ibrahim Salih Mohammed 
al-Yacoub, and AN Saed bin Ali al-Houri, all well-known Saudi businessmen from 
Jidda. [961 Qadi, a man with interests in banks and business throughout the world, had 
been the former head of the Muwafaq charity which would be accused of channeling 
millions of dollars from Saudi businessmen to Al Qaeda. A month later, on 24 October, 
Congress passed with surprising speed the United States Patriot Act, officially known as 
"Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to 
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." That Act established an interagency task force to 
follow the money-trail. Next, Operation Green Quest combined agents from the US 
Customs Service, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the FBI, and the Secret Service 
to investigate suspect charities and corrupt financial institutions that funded terrorist 
activities both in the USA and around the world. Hundreds of agents and intelligence 
analysts began to discover wire transfers of funds that linked the 9/1 1 hijackers with 
terrorist cells in Europe. In Germany a group dominated by Al Qaeda member Ramzi 
bin al-Shibh had provided both financial and logistical support to the hijackers; the 
investigation led to the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, a terrorist leader.[97] And 
once the routes used and the dimension of the money flow was understood, it became 
absolutely essential to proscribe those institutions used by terrorists to fund their 
operations. 

On 29 and 30 October 2001 at an extraordinary Plenary [Meeting) on the Financing of 
Terrorism held in Washington DC, FATF announced it had begun to crack down on 
specific institutions. [98] Officials at FATF were determined to expand its mission to 
"focus its energy and expertise," and a crucial aspect of the FATF effort was to impose 
severe penalties for financing terrorism, terrorist acts, and terrorist organizations. In 
addition, UN country members were urged to take immediate steps to ratify and to 
implement the 1999 United Nations International Convention for the Suppression of the 



Financing of Terrorism. The UN Security Council and EU responded by promulgating 
regulations designed to discourage money-laundering and the flow of terrorist funds 
while expanding the authority of FATF and the European Wolfsberg Group to interdict 
and halt the flow of terrorist funds. 

The UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1373 requiring member states to freeze 
and confiscate terrorist assets. It published information concerning funds frozen or 
sequestered, and established procedures to ensure that non-profit organizations were 
not being used to finance terrorism. It established a Counter-Terrorism Committee to 
monitor the implementation of the resolution. And following the invasion of Afghanistan 
by coalition forces and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban regime, the Security 
Council passed a new resolution (UNSCR 1390) which strengthened the sanctions 
against remaining elements of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. UNSCR 1390 also established 
the Al Qaeda Monitoring Group charged with investigating, reporting, and making 
recommendations against Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban. FATF would 
intensify its cooperation with the numerous financial investigative agencies including 
those in the UN, the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units, the Group of Twenty, 
the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, and the Asia-Pacific Economic 
Cooperation Forum. [991 Within two months after 9/1 1 some sixty-six countries, including 
UAE and Saudi Arabia, together known to be the source of most of Al Qaeda's money, 
introduced procedures to block the assets of those terrorist organizations identified by 
the USA. The UK established an anti-terrorist finance unit, and in the EU only Italy was 
reluctant to introduce transnational financial regulations, and actually enacted a law that 
hindered any investigation of the flow of funds across its borders. 

The United States Patriot Act of October 2001 had given sweeping authority for 
coordination among intelligence agencies, which had previously been legally 
circumscribed. The Treasury could now require US financial institutions to "terminate 
correspondent accounts maintained for foreign shell banks" and ensure that domestic 
banks would not "indirectly provide banking services to foreign shell banks." Tax 
Information Exchange Agreements were negotiated with known tax-havens including the 
Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands Antilles, and 
Antigua and Barbuda. The Patriot Act required American financial institutions to have by 
April 2002 a program in place to prevent money-laundering, and to allay the fears that 
"intelligence sources and methods" would be compromised, it also permitted in-camera 
judicial review of classified information used to freeze terrorist assets. These 
investigations soon led to the Netherlands, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. By then US officials 
were convinced that Osama bin Laden had "an archipelago of bank accounts" that 
stretched "from Barclays Bank in London ... to Girocredit in Vienna to several banks in 
Dubai." Indeed, UAE was said to be Bin Laden's banking hub of choice because it 
maintained official relations with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and thus 
provided a direct connection to Bin Laden himself. HOOl 

By 1999 US intelligence services were aware that the Dubai Islamic Bank served as a 
major conduit for Osama bin Laden's funds. Dubai's lax banking practices were easily 
circumvented, and funds sent by the Dubai Islamic Bank to Al Qaeda agents were linked 
to the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Nearly half the 
$500,000 used by terrorists to prepare the 9/11 attack had been wired to the USA from 
Dubai banks. Eventually, UAE would enact laws against moneylaundering "within the 
framework of . . . efforts to fight terrorism in all its forms," which provided for long prison 
terms and heavy fines. [1011 Elsewhere in the Gulf, Kuwait issued an 



anti-money-laundering law in 2002 and created a Financial Intelligence Unit to monitor 
local banks and money exchange companies. A year after 9/11 the US Treasury had 
succeeded "in locating and freezing some $112 million in assets belonging to Al Qaeda 
and its associates." Terrorist organizations reacted swiftly, and thereafter only a little 
more than $10 million in additional assets were found and frozen. Cooperating 
governments reported "having particular difficulty in monitoring and regulating funds 
collected and disbursed by a number of Islamic-based charities" that "collect billions of 
dollars each year, using most of it" for beneficent purposes. [1021 

The initial tepid response from the Saudis disturbed both the EU and the USA. 
Nonetheless, the campaign against terrorist financing began to produce a financial 
strain on the Al Qaeda network. Equally important, it frightened potential donors, who 
feared being caught funding organizations or individuals on the terrorist lists circulated 
by the USA, UN, and EU. At the private request of the USA the Saudi Arabian Monetary 
Authority (SAMA) began to monitor some 150 bank accounts "associated with some of 
the country's most prominent businessmen in a bid to prevent them from being used 
wittingly or unwittingly for the tunneling of funds to terrorist organizations." SAMA had 
"sent a circular to all Saudi banks to uncover whether those listed in suspect lists have 
any real connection with terrorism," and among the accounts uncovered were those at 
the Al Rajhi Banking Corporation, the Dallah Al Baraka Group, and the National 
Commercial Bank (NCB), Saudi Arabia's largest bank. [103l Created in 1952, SAMA 
was largely responsible for enforcing the archaic 1966 Saudi Banking Control Law that 
regulated the nation's banking system. Since his appointment in 1983 the director of 
SAMA, Hamad al-Sayari, who was nominally responsible to the Ministry of Finance and 
National Economy, had enforced a fairly strict set of regulations to ensure the stability 
of the banking sector; they included regulations that Saudi banks maintain 20 percent of 
deposits as a liquid reserve, and the prohibition against lending more than 25 percent of 
their capital to any single customer. In practice, however, al-Sayari would not or could 
not impose punitive damages against violators without royal approval. 

In December 2002 the UN Security Council received a new report that expanded the 
list of individuals and charities involved with terrorists. It also exposed the close 
relationship between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia. It was prepared by Jean-Charles 
Brisard, an investigator who had compiled the first extensive intelligence report on the 
financial network of Osama bin Laden for the 9/11 Families United to Bankrupt 
Terrorism, the circle of families who had lost relatives in the 9/11 attack and were suing, 
among others, the Saudi royal family for $1 trillion. Brisard argued that the financial 
success of Al Qaeda was attributed to the bankers, oilmen, and construction magnates 
who were "allies" of the USA but who also supported Islamic charities that provided 
funds for Bin Laden. Although Islamic charities such as the Al Haramain Islamic 
Foundation, BIF, IIRO, MWL, Rabita Trust, and WAMY all contributed to terrorist 
organizations, known or unknown by their donors, legitimate Saudi business enterprises 
and direct "contributions" from wealthy Saudi individuals were also crucial to the Al 
Qaeda fiscal network. Saudi Arabia could no longer ignore the need for more strict 
regulations of its charities and the archaic banking laws that gave them virtual 
autonomy. Consequently, when Saudi Arabia invited FATF and its Working Group on 
Terrorist Financing to visit the kingdom in April 2003 to conduct a "Mutual Evaluation," 
Secretary of State Colin Powell was able to announce that "everything we have asked 
them to do they have done. " [1041 In Saudi Arabia FATF argued for the establishment of 
a domestic Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to collect real-time intelligence and share 



such information with local authorities and the sixty-nine Fills operating internationally. 
Shortly afterward SAMA issued new guidelines including a "Know Your Customer" 
program to identify suspicious activity, but the government neither formed an FIU nor 
agreed to the outside evaluation proposed by FATF. [105] 



Saudi banking 

Banking, like most institutions in Saudi Arabia, was inextricably intertwined with the 
House of Saud. In 1744 Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) allied himself with 
Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of the small town of Dir'iyya in Najd (Saudi Arabia). Ibn 
Wahhab was an Islamic scholar educated by Islamic clergy in Iraq, Iran, and the Hijaz 
region of western Arabia. He viewed himself as a reformer insisting that his followers, 
the muwahhidun (unitarians), return to the sources of Islam that stressed the absolute 
unity of God and the strict observance of the fundamental meaning of the Quran and the 
Hadith, the sayings and traditions of the Prophet. The Wahhabis, as the sect was 
commonly called, fiercely rejected the innovations (bid'a) then current in Najd, where 
some Sufi brotherhoods permitted and promoted polytheism and approved the role of 
saints as intermediaries between God and man. Eventually, the alliance between church 
and state enabled Ibn Wahhab and Ibn Saud to establish a state governed by the 
Shari'a instead of traditional tribal custom. Fired with the zeal of true believers the 
Wahhabis spread their movement by the sword among the tribes of central Arabia, 
destroyed the Shi'ite shrines of Karbala in southwestern Iraq, and occupied Mecca and 
Medina, where they obliterated the tombs of revered Muslim saints. 

As the Wahhabis moved north into Ottoman Syria the Sultan sent his Viceroy in Egypt, 
Muhammad AN Pasha, to suppress the movement. After years of campaigning in 1822 
Muhammad Ali and his sons had finally destroyed the core of Wahhabi power in Najd, 
but not the movement itself. The restoration of the Wahhabi was initiated in the late 
nineteenth century by the al-Saud family. In 1902 Abd al-Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman bin 
Saud, son of the last Saudi governor of Riyadh, led a daring raid to recapture Riyadh 
from the ruling al-Rashids of Shammar and thus restore his family to power in Najd. 
Thereafter, he extended his authority, relying on his own Ikhwan - members of 
militarized agricultural colonies he created in 1912 - that would transcend tribal loyalties 
and adhere strictly to the puritanical principles of Wahhabism. During the First World 
War he received gold and weapons from Great Britain to be used against the Ottoman 
Turks and their Arab allies. And though the First World War ended in 1918, Ibn Saud 
employed British arms to overthrow his principal rivals, the al-Rashids. In 1921 he 
captured their capital, Ha'il, and in 1924 he occupied the Hijaz, driving Sharif Husayn 
bin Ali from the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Two years later the Ikhwan 
conquered Asir Province, then under the protection of Imam Yahya of Yemen, but when 
prohibited by Ibn Saud to attack Shi'ites under British protection in Iraq, the Ikhwan 
revolted against him in 1927. They were suppressed two years later after hard fighting 
in their garrison town of Artawiyya, and Ibn Saud celebrated his victory in 1932 by 
incorporating the Hijaz and Najd as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the same year he 
signed a concession with an American company to prospect for oil. 

Thereafter, Ibn Saud consolidated his power in alliance with the ulama, strictly 
imposing the Shari'a and promoting the hajj, another pillar of Islam. Although he had 



subordinated the power of the Ikhwan to his authority, Wahhabi doctrines had great 
appeal to Islamic reformers, particularly the Salafiyya Movement in late 
nineteenth-century Egypt and in the twentieth the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood 
founded in 1928 by the Egyptian shaykh Hasan al-Banna. The greatest challenge to 
Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, however, came in the early 1960s when the impact of 
phenomenal wealth from oil began to permeate throughout Saudi society. To combat the 
corrosive influence of these unfettered riches the Wahhabi movement and its mutavia'in 
(religious volunteers and the contemporary name for religious police), who were the 
successors of the Wahhabi Ikhwan, imposed a strict observance of Wahhabi principles 
that prohibited the melodious recitation of the Quran, veneration of tombs, 
desegregation of the sexes, and the appearance of the female form on television. Under 
Wahhabism the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became a refuge for Islamic radicals and 
Muslim Brothers who fled from persecution by the secular, militant pan-Arab rulers, 
particularly Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Many found refuge teaching in the new 
Islamic University of Medina and the King Abdul Aziz University in Jidda. The Muslim 
Brothers had incorporated their own revolutionary and Salafist propensities with 
traditional Wahhabism that had a profound influence on students, society, and 
eventually on charitable organizations. Among them were the hypnotic Muhammad Qutb 
(the brother of author, Muslim Brother, and Salafist Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. 
Azzam left a powerful impression on young Saudis, including a student named Osama 
bin Laden. Indeed, the export of Islamist education was, in many instances, the task of 
Islamist preachers and clerics financed by Saudi charities. 

During the two centuries that followed the appearance of Ibn Wahhab the banking 
sector was slow to germinate in the Muslim world. Persia introduced western banking in 
1889 with the establishment of the Imperial Bank of Persia, but the growth of that bank 
and other state banks was painfully slow. The reasons were many, some having to do 
with colonialism, others with Islam itself. When the ruling council of Al Azhar University 
reaffirmed that usury or interest on loans, the basis of western banking, was haram 
(unlawful, unacceptable) according to the principles of Islamic law, Lord Cromer, the 
British de facto dictator of Egypt and a member of the Baring Brothers banking family, 
installed a pliable Grand Mufti who ignored the university council ruling and permitted 
the practice of usury. In the Persian Gulf the British first introduced western banking in 
Bahrain, and by the Second World War the Bahrainis themselves had become involved 
in banking, and the island was soon to become the financial center of the Gulf. 

The extraordinary demand for oil after the Second World War provided the wealth that 
only modern banks could manage efficiently. NCB was the first domestic institution to 
receive a banking license, to be followed in the 1950s by a succession of foreign banks 
that were duly licensed. Although oil would soon transform the Saudi economy, the 
Saudi kingdom was still an impoverished state dependent mostly on hajj revenues. The 
profligate successor to Ibn Saud, King Saud bin Abd al-Aziz (r. 1953-1964), was 
continually strapped for cash. Thus, when his brother Prince Faisal bin Abd al-Aziz, the 
Saudi Minister of Finance, approached Salim Ahmad bin Mahfouz, the owner of NCB, 
for a loan to replenish the royal treasury, he "turned him down flat." Mahfouz had helped 
the royal family over many a hard time, but Faisal's request far exceeded any previous 
appeal. In that same year King Saud had squandered his father's patrimony, driving the 
kingdom to the brink of bankruptcy, with only 317 riyals - less than $100 - in the 
national treasury. The personally austere Faisal reacted to Mahfouz's rejection by 
withdrawing his personal finances from the bank, "and told his family to do the 



same. " [1061 Within a short time Mahfouz relented. The royal family received their loans, 
but Faisal never forgot his humiliation and now understood the powerful role that banks 
played in the financial affairs of his kingdom. 

By 1964 the Saud family had lost all confidence in the king for his spendthrift habits 
and his failed policy of appeasement towards Gamal Abdel Nasser, which had not 
prevented the Egyptian invasion of Yemen. With the powerful support of the religious 
establishment King Saud was deposed and replaced by the capable Faisal bin Abd 
al-Aziz (r. 1964-1975). Faisal's austerity and reforms, which he already had begun as 
Prime Minister, laid the foundations for a modern government and a social welfare 
system that benefited from the astonishing increase in oil revenues after 1973. During 
the Suez crisis of 1956, Faisal, then Finance Minister, had refused demands for an 
Arab oil boycott of the West, but he could no longer resist another boycott after the 
outbreak of the Arab-Israel (October) war of 1973 The subsequent boycott by OPEC 
sent the price of oil soaring, creating serious problems for the Saudi treasury's primitive 
financial infrastructure, especially in the management of the $34 billion annual infusion 
of oil revenues, which had been only $8 billion before the October war. Faisal believed 
that the huge sums deposited in western banks should be invested in development, but 
the problems of great wealth that seemed to have overwhelmed him were partially 
resolved after his assassination in 1975. The following year the Council of Ministers 
decreed that the maximum foreign shareholding in domestic banks could not exceed 40 
percent. To survive, seven western banks formed joint ventures with newly created 
Saudi banks. It proved to be a dynamic stimulant for a domestic banking industry that in 
1976 was still in its infancy. A quarter-century later the Saudi banking sector had 
evolved from a primitive system of little significance into a sophisticated and powerful 
player in both the Islamic world and the West. 

By 1995 Saudi Arabia's twelve commercial banks were flush with oil revenues to rank 
among the top ten banks in the Arab world. Five of these ten, "measured by tier one 
capital," were based in the kingdom, and its leading bank, NCB, was well respected in 
the global financial community. Nevertheless, Saudi banking practices remained 
somewhat idiosyncratic, for they could not be totally separated from the distinctive 
characteristics of Saudi government finances. "Until the mid-1980s, Saudi banks had it 
easy. The phenomenal growth in the economy fuelled by government spending enabled 
them to make significant profits, [and] there was little pressure to institute good banking 
practices." There was "a tendency to go in for 'name lending,' whereby loans were 
made based on the identity of the client rather than being based on an assessment of 
the credit risk. " [1071 Thus, the recession that followed the collapse of oil prices in 1986 
came as a severe shock to Saudi bankers. They discovered that many of their major 
borrowers could not, or would not, meet their payments, and large sums had to be 
written off as defaulted loans. It was not until the mini-boom in oil prices that followed the 
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that the domestic Saudi banks recovered to emerge as the 
strongest group in the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council, founded in 1981. 

By 1993 Saudi banks were making an average return on equity in excess of 15 
percent and a return on average assets of 1.5 percent. By the twenty-first century 
Saudi Arabia had twelve commercial banks, all majority owned by Saudis In addition 
there were state development banks that offered soft loans for infrastructure and 
agriculture projects. Although foreign and offshore bankers did participate in syndicated 
financing, foreign banks were still not allowed to open offices in the kingdom. In 2003 
the Saudi economy ran a record surplus of $12 billion, and beginning in 2004, yet 



another rise in the price of oil led to an increase in Saudi reserves to nearly $25 billion. 
US dollars accounted for nearly 80 percent of the total, but in juxtaposition there 
remained the weight of a huge public debt amounting to nearly $180 billion dollars. 



Islamic banking 

The introduction of modern Islamic banking in the 1980s owed much to the foundations 
laid by Hasan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood. He personally promulgated both 
the theory and practice required to establish an Islamic banking system among the 
ranks of the Ikhwan. From its very beginnings in 1928 the Brotherhood placed a very 
high priority on the establishment of an Islamic economic system, and Hasan al-Banna, 
Sayyid Qutb, Yousuf al-Qaradawi, "and numerous other scholars laid down some of the 
groundwork for practical theories of Islamic finance. "[108] The Muslim Brothers 
watched, waited, and learned the management of money that was essential to finance a 
worldwide organization devoted to the spread of Islam. To preserve the fiscal 
independence necessary to achieve their objectives, the only acceptable source of 
money was from its own members. Yet another pioneer in Islamic banking was the 
Swiss banker Francois Genoud, who set up Swiss bank accounts for the various 
Maghreb liberation movements active in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. On behalf of the 
Syrian government, Genoud then created the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva, and in 
1962 he was named Director of the Arab People's Bank in Algeria, a predecessor of the 
modern Islamic bank. [1091 Throughout his long involvement with Islam it was taken for 
granted that Genoud was in the pay of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Ikhwan 
appeared in little need of outside help as they spread their movement amongst Muslims 
all the way to the republics of the former Soviet Union. 

Islamic banking as practiced today is, in reality, a recent phenomenon attributed to the 
Egyptian economist Ahmad al-Najjar, who in 1963 created the Mit Cham Savings Bank 
in Cairo, but it was not until the meeting of Islamic states in Lahore in 1973 that the first 
unified Islamic Development Bank was launched. Headquartered in Jidda, the bank's 
operations were governed by Islamic principles. Its capital was subscribed by Saudi 
Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Turkey, but the Saudi 
royal family played the predominant role in the funding of projects that within a decade 
surpassed $3 billion. Two years later the Dubai Islamic Bank was founded, and in 1979 
Pakistan became the first country to officially Islamize its banking sector. Since then 
scores of private commercial Islamic banks have opened for business and begun to 
compete with conventional banks in many Arab and then in other Muslim and 
non-Muslim countries. By 1983 the Association of Islamic Banks had helped in the 
establishment of a dozen banks in new venues, including Cyprus, Austria, and the 
Bahamas. From that "genuinely novel development in Islam," Islamic banking would gain 
"modest market niches by the nineteen-nineties that began to attract the attention of the 
international business community. " [1101 Islamic banks opened in Geneva and the UK. 
By the mid-1980s the Ministries of Awqaf of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi were both important 
players in international Islamic banking. They were both shareholders in the emerging 
Islamic Banking System International of Luxembourg whose majority stockholder, 25 
percent, was the Saudi Al Baraka Group. Some large international banks, including 
Citibank, Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, and ANZ International, offered a range of Islamic 
services, and a few launched mutual funds considered unobjectionable by experts in the 



Shari'a. The British bank Kleinwort Benson even established an Islamic Banking 
Research Institute to develop new instruments for Islamic finance of commerce in 
consultation with Islamic scholars, but in London the Saudi-based Al Baraka Group 
relinquished its license, permitting it to be a deposit-taking bank in 1993 "rather than 
undergo expensive restructuring to conform to the requirements of the Bank of 
England. " [11 11 Islamic finance was introduced into North America in the 1980s, but its 
promise lagged behind the rest of the world, as "the main problems centered on the 
existing banking and security laws [in the USA], which were seen as unduly 
restrictive. " [1 121 In the USA Islamic banking is still in its infancy. 

Islamic finance has been considered by one banking expert as the "major laboratory 
for innovation by Islamists, who are determined by definition to remake or modernize 
contemporary reality by Islamizing it." To Islamize banking means that Islamic banks 
should operate according to Islamic principles derived from the Quran and by the 
exhortations against exploitation and the unjust acquisition of wealth by the Prophet 
Muhammad, the search for halal (religiously permissible) profits. Islam considers 
objectionable investments in alcohol, gambling, pornography, and other products and 
services of a similar nature. While creative labor, exchange of goods, common trade, 
and the quest for profit are not discouraged, Islamic banks cannot give and investors 
cannot receive a guaranteed rate of return on deposits. Specifically, Islamic banks 
cannot collect interest {riba) on accounts, for such payments are considered to be 
usury In order to circumvent this proscription, Muslim legal scholars have devised a 
banking system wherein depositors can invest in profit-sharing ventures that involve a 
business risk equally shared by banker and depositor, the profits not being considered 
interest. Other Islamic financial instruments used to avoid usury include murabahah 
(deferred payment on purchases, often called mark-up financing), ijara (leasing), and 
ijara wa iqtina (lease purchase financing). Mudarabah (partnerships where one party 
provides capital and the other labor, often called trust finance) and musharakah (equity 
participation). Al are recognized as legitimate use of one's money. Thus, the 
fundamental difference between Islamic and traditional banking systems is that "in an 
Islamic system deposits are regarded as shares that [do) not guarantee their nominal 
value. " [1131 Shaykh Nizam Yaquby, a graduate in economics from McGill University 
and presently the adviser on Shari'a to the Arab Islamic Bank in Bahrain, has described 
the constraints on investment of savings as the maximization of profits within an ethical 
framework. The greatest challenge for Islamic banks, however, was their inability to 
make long-term transactions because most of the deposits were short-term ones that 
required more flexible instruments to comply with halal. 

By the 1990s deposits in Islamic banks were growing at the rate of 15 percent 
annually, and most Islamic banks were controlled by private investors, except those in 
Iran and Pakistan, which were nationalized. Operating in more than fifty countries, 
Islamic banks could now account for more than $80 billion in savings, but despite this 
impressive growth the competition from commercial banks that offered many more 
technologically sophisticated financial services and long-term loans discouraged Muslim 
depositors: the famed Dubai Islamic Bank required a rescue package in 1998. The 
greatest single success was in Bahrain, which has long served as the global hub of 
Islamic banking and whose banking officials have served as a pool for Islamic banking 
expertise, modernization, and innovation. The total assets of Islamic banks and financial 
institutions operating in Bahrain were $3.65 billion at the end of September 2003. That 
strength enabled them to bail out an Islamic bank that threatened to fail in Thailand in 



2002 and a "Sharia-compatible" bank in the UK. M141 

Some Islamic states have regarded Islamic banking with considerable distrust, 
associating its bankers with the secretive Muslim Brotherhood or the financial instrument 
of the governing elite. Both secular regimes, such as Syria or Iraq, and the traditional 
regimes of Oman and Saudi Arabia have actively discouraged Islamic banking 
institutions. In other countries such as Egypt and Jordan, the performance of Islamic 
banks has been generally disappointing, but Algeria successfully introduced Islamic 
banking in 1988 and even permitted the establishment of new Islamic banks after the 
outbreak of the Islamist insurrection in 1992. In 1989 after the coup d'etat and its 
Islamic revolution the Sudan officially adopted Islamic banking practices, which hitherto 
had been somewhat haphazard. In East Asia Islamic banks have gained a foothold in 
Bangladesh, and in Malaysia a dual banking system survived thanks to a special 
partnership between the Malaysian Central Bank and the Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad, 
founded in 1983, which transacts more than 70 percent of its business in non-Muslim 
accounts. 

In Saudi Arabia the royal family has consistently opposed the introduction of Islamic 
banking, and for years refused to grant banking licenses to the Dallah Al Baraka and 
Dar al-Mal al-lslami (Islam's House of Finance), despite the fact that Al Baraka was led 
by the successful Saudi businessman Saleh Kamel and the Dar al-Mal al-lslami Trust 
(DMI) was the $3.5 billion holding company for the powerful Faisal Financial SA of 
Switzerland and the Faisal Islamic Bank. Many assumed that SAMA was "content" to 
maintain competition between banks at a comfortable level, and that the introduction of 
the powerful Geneva-based DMI might just destabilize the Saudi financial sector. n 1 51 
Cynical observers wondered if the problem was not its secretive operations. Others 
believed that DMI has survived by distributing subsidies to the royal family. In recent 
years Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud, son of the late King Faisal, was a member of the 
board of directors before becoming its President. The King Faisal Foundation of Riyadh 
remained a principal shareholder, and true to form DMI shareholders were expected to 
pay an annual zakat on the profits that might accrue from investments. The 
investigations into terrorist financing after 9/11 discovered that DMI had connections to 
the Bin Laden family and that Haydar Mohamed bin Laden, a half-brother of Osama bin 
Laden, served as one of its twelve directors. DMI also held shares in Bank Al Taqwa, 
registered in the Bahamas and based in Switzerland, which was closed for business in 
November 2001 after Washington blacklisted it as the centerpiece of Bin Laden's 
financial network. 11 161 After 9/11 Islamic banks immediately denied any part, witting or 
not, in funding terrorism, but the investigations of terrorist financing soon uncovered the 
fact that the regulatory supervision by central banks and international agencies was 
badly flawed. At the 2002 World Islamic Banking Conference hosted by the government 
of Bahrain one speaker argued rather disingenuously that Islamic banks had neither the 
surplus funds nor the methods of distribution to support terrorism. 



Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corporation 

When SAMA finally decided to license an Islamic bank, it selected the relatively small 
Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corporation. Why the Al Rajhi Bank was selected 
remains a mystery, but since so much of Saudi private capital was held and invested in 
Islamic banks abroad the king may have decided it was time that Saudi Arabia had its 



own domestic Islamic bank that would enhance the legitimacy of the royal family as the 
historical caretakers and promoters of Islam. 11171 The Al Rajhi was a "traditional" Saudi 
merchant family whose wealth rivaled that of the Al Sauds throughout the first half of the 
twentieth century. King Abd al-Aziz had frequently depended on Al Rajhi for financial 
support, and its comfortable relationship with the royal family lasted until the oil revenues 
burgeoned in the 1970s to free the monarchy from its financial dependence on wealthy 
merchants. Founded as "a local money-changing network," the Al Rajhi Bank redefined 
itself as an Islamic bank. [1181 

After a fitful start the Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corporation began to attract both 
large and small investors, and by 2001 it had become the third-largest bank in Saudi 
Arabia, with over 400 branch banks including separate branches only for women. 
Originally, Saudi Arabia's major banks dealt principally with the royal family and wealthy 
customers, but Al Rajhi carved its own niche from deposits made by the Saudi middle 
class. |1 191 Yousif Abdullah al-Rajhi of the parent Al Rajhi Company for Industry and 
Trade maintained a close centralized control over its foreign banking operations, 
particularly in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Not surprisingly, the head of the Al Rajhi 
family, Suleiman al-Rajhi, was a member of the Golden Chain of wealthy investors who 
supported Osama bin Laden. 



National Commercial Bank 

The National Commercial Bank (NCB) was founded as the first Saudi domestic bank in 
Jidda in 1950 by members of the Kaki family and Salim bin Mahfouz. Like the Bin 
Laden family, who intermarried with the Mahfouz, Salim was an impoverished Yemeni 
immigrant from the Hadhramawt who settled in Saudi Arabia in 1930. Mahfouz became 
a money-changer, from which he amassed a considerable fortune and with the Kaki 
family convinced King Saud to grant NCB a license. During its first twenty-five years 
NCB struggled against stiff competition from the preferred foreign banks. In 1976 when 
foreign banks were forced into joint ventures, it was finally able to compete on a more 
level playing field. Under the exceptional management of Mahfouz, NCB was organized 
through a series of holding companies, the most prominent being the Saudi Economic 
and Development Company LLC (SEDCO), a conglomerate founded in 1976 and based 
in Jidda. Upon his death in 1986 NCB ranked first in equity and second in assets in 
Saudi Arabia, and it operated numerous banks throughout the Muslim world and the 
West. It was already one of the most powerful Arab-owned enterprises in the Gulf and 
the bank of choice of the royal family. 

Following the death of Salim bin Mahfouz he was succeeded by his eldest son, Khaled 
bin Mahfouz, as President, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and the largest shareholder 
of NCB stock. In 1989 he was appointed to the governing council of the Saudi oil giant 
Aramco by King Fahd, but his good fortune was about to change. In the late 1980s 
NCB, like other Saudi banks, suffered heavy losses during a recession in the Saudi 
economy that had forced many creditors to default on their loans. NCB recovered but 
was again placed in jeopardy in 1990 and 1991 when senior members of the Saudi 
royal family defaulted on their very large loans, the extent of which was so great that 
either the debts would have to be repaid or NCB would go under. Even worse, Khaled 
bin Mahfouz made an unfortunate business decision. He purchased 20 percent of the 
Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), founded in 1970 by a Pakistani, 



Agha Hasan Abedia, with Arab money. The Kakis, who still held a third of the shares in 
NCB, apparently had no say in the matter. 11201 Unfortunately for the Mahfouz family, 
between 1986 and 1990 Khaled had agreed to serve as the Chief Operating Officer of 
BCCI, known as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals" in the USA. Khaled bin Mahfouz 
was then accused of "hiding assets and in the cover-up and obstruction of the Senate 
investigation" which had uncovered a score of its fraudulent practices in July 1992. He 
was promptly indicted in the USA and charged with participating in a "Scheme to 
Defraud in the First Degree in violation of New York Penal Law 190.65, in connection 
with certain of defendant's acts and omissions relative to BCCI holdings and certain 
related entities." In other words, Mahfouz was charged with embezzlement and violations 
of American, Luxembourg, and British banking laws by misrepresentations, sham loans, 
money-laundering, and falsifying his holdings in BCCI. 

When BCCI collapsed, the solvency of NCB was threatened and Khaled was forced to 
resign as CEO in 1992. After a year of convoluted and persistent negotiations NCB 
settled with the liquidators of BCCI in November 1993; the charges against NCB were 
dropped, and Michael Callen from Citibank was assigned to reorganize NCB and save it 
from bankruptcy. Khaled bin Mahfouz agreed to pay a $245 million settlement, including 
a personal fine of $37 million, to indemnify some of the bank's clients. The Mahfouz 
family was disgraced, and the Kaki family, who still held a third of the shares of NCB, 
systematically reduced their holdings to 10 percent and no longer played any significant 
role in the management of the bank. [1211 It was during this turbulent decade that Yassin 
Abdallah al-Qadi, assistant to Khaled bin Mahfouz, introduced Islamic banking services 
at NCB and the Al Rajhi Bank with the assistance of the National Management 
Consultancy Center (NMCC) of which Yassin was Director from 1991 to 2002. 

In August 1998 Khaled bin Mahfouz was again in the news when the El-Shifa 
pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum was destroyed by US cruise missiles in a poorly 
planned and questionable attack on what was thought to be part of the Bin Laden 
business empire. In a desperate attempt to justify the bombing, the owner, Salah Idris, 
was called a "banking protege" of Mahfouz, and US and UK officials spent substantial 
time investigating Salah Idris's Capital Trust Bank of New York and London searching 
for a connection to Osama bin Laden. [1221 Then in 1999, SAMA audited NCB and 
found serious discrepancies in its books. Although family members were permitted to 
retain 10 percent of the capital and seats on the board of directors, the controlling 
shares in NCB were transferred to the Saudi state authorities Under new management 
NCB recovered to emerge stronger than ever as Saudi Arabia's most important bank 
with assets of $26.5 billion. [1231 There remained, however, deep suspicions in the West 
that NCB was being used as a financial conduit that had "tunneled millions to charities 
believed to be serving as bin Laden fronts." [124l 



Dallah Al Baraka Group and Bank Al Taqwa 

In 1969 Shaykh Saleh Abdallah Kamel founded the Dallah Works and Maintenance 
Corporation to introduce Islamic principles into its operations that could be adapted to 
global markets. Born in Mecca in 1941, he was a pioneer in modernizing Saudi Arabian 
banking institutions, and under his skillful management Dallah grew steadily, expanding 
into banking, investment, insurance, and lending throughout the Islamic world. By 1995 
Dallah Al Baraka Group had absorbed more than 300 companies with 60,000 



employees and $7 billion in assets. After 9/11 the US government began to investigate 
the Group as part of a larger investigation of Islamic banking practices and fiscal 
transactions that abetted the financial network of Al Qaeda. The possible and possibly 
unwitting link between Dallah Al Baraka Group and Al Qaeda became more focused in 
August 2002 when the family members of the 3,000 American citizens killed in the 
destruction of the World Trade Center brought suit among others against three Saudi 
princes: Defense Minister Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud, former chief of Saudi 
intelligence services Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, and businessman Muhammad al-Faisal 
al-Saud. [1251 The class-action lawsuit specifically charged the Al Baraka Investment 
and Development Corporation (BIDC) of Jidda as one of the many companies in the 
Dallah Al Baraka Group. 

BIDC was singled out by US authorities because of questionable investments in two 
banks suspected of having financial links to terrorist organizations: the Al Aqsa Bank in 
the Palestinian territory of the West Bank and the Al Baraka Exchange LLC in Somalia. 
In addition BIDC owned a percentage of Bank Al Taqwa, a "brass plate" finance 
company based in the Bahamas, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. Khaled al-Nehdi, Vice 
President of Dallah Al Baraka Group for public relations, explained that SAMA had not 
monitored these three accounts, for they were located outside Saudi Arabia. He did 
admit, however, that the Dallah Al Baraka Group had obtained a 20 percent stake in Al 
Aqsa in 1999 when "hopes were high for a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement." He 
vehemently denied that the Group ever had any association with either Baraka 
Exchange of Somalia or Al Taqwa. [1261 When the UN Suppression of Terrorism list was 
issued in November 2001 , any relationship between the Dallah Al Baraka Group and the 
Al Baraka Exchange of UAE and the Al Baraka of Mogadishu with headquarters in 
Dubai was conspicuously absent. That led Shaykh Saleh Kamel to accuse "some 
irresponsible" Americans of attempting to blackmail Islamic financial institutions and 
charities after 9/11. In contrast, Bank Al Taqwa (Fear of God) was a very different 
story. It was a shell bank whose financial transactions were used primarily to support 
Islamist organizations. Established in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1988 with financing from the 
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the bank included among its investors several members 
of the Bin Laden family. [1271 Its two principal directors were mysterious businessmen, 
Youssef Mustafa Nada and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin. 

Youssef Nada was a Tunisian citizen born in Egypt, a member of the Muslim 
Brotherhood, and Chairman of the Nada Management Organization (aka Al Taqwa 
Management Organization) of Lugano, Switzerland. In 1954 he had fled from arrest in 
Egypt to Libya during the reign of King Idris, the deeply religious leader of the 
Sanusiyya Brotherhood. In 1965, for reasons never made public, he was tried in Egypt 
in absentia and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. When Colonel Muammar Qaddafi 
seized power in Libya in 1969, Nada fled once again, this time to Austria where he soon 
made a fortune dealing in wholesale building materials. He soon became interested in 
banking and founded the Nada Management Organization, which eventually advised the 
CA Bankverein of Vienna on its efforts to introduce strict Islamic banking practices in 
Europe. In 1970, with the help of Egyptian Muslim Brothers, he opened an office in 
Riyadh, and five years later he transferred his company from Austria to Campione 
d'ltalia on Lake Lugano and took Italian nationality. Nada remained active in Arab 
banking, and helped Egypt open one of its first Islamic banks. He then created Bank Al 
Taqwa and used the Bahamas as a false-front headquarters to benefit from its favorable 
banking laws and tax exemptions. Nada bought full-page advertisements in Egyptian 



newspapers announcing that he was opening an Islamic bank and displaying the names 
of 500 Muslims who had opened accounts with Al Taqwa. From then on Nada would 
divide his time between his commercial operations and Islamic banking. [1281 

Ahmed Nasreddin was born in Ethiopia in 1929. He had been an Honorary Consul for 
Kuwait in Milan where he had substantial financial holdings in his Nasreddin 
International Group and the Nasreddin Foundation (aka Nasreddin Stiftung), which was 
yet another shell operation that, inter alia, provided funds for the Islamic Center of 
Milan. The Foundation was legally dissolved in 1993, but the name was used in business 
transactions as late as 2000. Nasreddin's financial network provided direct support for 
Bank Al Taqwa, and the bank was listed by the USA on 7 November 2001 and by the UN 
two days later. In addition to its Chairman, Youssef Mustafa Nada, the US sanctions list 
included the bank's Vice Chairman and Muslim Brother, Ali Ghaleb Himmat, and a 
Swiss citizen, Albert F. A. Huber. Huber had been a political journalist, admirer of Adolf 
Hitler, and a rabid anti-Semite who converted to militant Islam and was appointed the 
Swiss director of Al Taqwa, fulfilling the requirement that a Swiss national must be on its 
board of directors. He publicly acknowledged in 1995 that wealthy Saudi Arabians were 
large contributors to Bank Al Taqwa, and that one of them, Ghalib Mohammed bin 
Laden, unsuccessfully sued the bank in 1999 for failure to pay $2.5 million on a 
mudarabah account. 

In 1996 Italian intelligence linked Bank Al Taqwa to HAMAS, the Algerian Armed 
Islamic Group and the Islamic Salvation Front, the Tunisian Al Nahda, and the Egyptian 
Jama'at al-lslamiyva. [1291 However, it was not until two months after 9/11 that US 
investigations led to the closing of Bank Al Taqwa operations in the Bahamas and 
Liechtenstein. Swiss authorities moved more slowly. They found nothing irregular 
despite the fact that Al Taqwa had been providing financial support for Bin Laden and Al 
Qaeda as late as September 2000. [1301 Then in March 2002 an investigative reporter in 
the USA discovered a previously secret list of names that appeared on an unpublished 
shareholders' register of Bank Al Taqwa which disclosed their personal holdings as of 
December 1999. The list revealed previously unpublicized Bank Al Taqwa shareholders, 
among whom were prominent Arab figures from numerous countries in the Middle East, 
including Yousuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, the radical Egyptian cleric and promoter of 
HAMAS, the Grand Mufti of UAE and five members of his family, a member of the 
Kuwaiti royal family, and members of the "prominent Khalifeh family of the United Arab 
Emirates; sisters Huta and Iman bin Laden who lived in Saudi Arabia. " [1311 

On 19 April 2002 the Treasury then froze the assets of Ali Ghaleb Himmat in the belief 
that he had long acted as a financial adviser to Al Qaeda. Born in Syria, a Muslim 
Brother, and Director of the Islamic Center of Munich, he was a member of the board of 
directors of the Geneva section of the Kuwaiti International Islamic Charitable 
Organization (IICO) and IIRO. He had banking interests in Munich and had long been 
under surveillance by the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrich- 
tendienst, BND), which reported Himmat's "pleasure" over the news of 9/11. 11321 In 
August 2002 an updated list of organizations having connections with Al Qaeda was 
prepared by the US Treasury for submission to the UN 1267 Sanctions Committee. It 
identified twenty-five new terrorist financial institutions, fourteen of which were owned or 
controlled by either Nada or Nasreddin, including the Akida Bank Private Ltd., whose 
majority ownership was held by the Nasreddin Foundation. [1331 "Lacking a physical 
presence and sharing the same address in the Bahamas where they were licensed," 
they were designated by OFAC as shell companies serving as conduits for terrorist 



funds, and under pressure from the US Treasury the Bahamian government revoked 
their banking licenses. [1341 

Finally, in December 2003 Youssef Nada and Ali Ghaleb Himmat were taken into 
custody by Italian police after their homes were raided in Campione d'ltalia. They were 
soon released, however, after which Nada admitted he had been in talks with the Swiss 
Deputy Attorney General. He claimed that the "FBI may have known who the 
shareholders were for as long as four years . . . since 1997 when I talked to them. " [1351 
In effect, the Swiss authorities had refused to cooperate with international intelligence 
inquiries into Al Taqwa. Swiss banks were protected by stringent secrecy laws, and the 
Swiss authorities argued that there was never sufficient evidence to merit a search 
warrant despite possessing the FBI list of bankers suspected of financing terrorism. 
Still, the Akida and Al Taqwa banks were closed, but the Al Taqwa Group simply became 
the Nada Management Organization of Lugano, Switzerland, from where Nada 
continued to deny funding Bin Laden or any other terrorist group. 



Hawala system 

After the US Treasury had frozen the assets of sixty-two organizations and individuals 
associated with Islamic banking and investment in November 2001, federal agents 
raided a number of their offices in the USA, Europe, and the Bahamas, from which they 
obtained substantial information on the genesis, morphology, and growth of the 
worldwide hawala banking system used by millions of Muslims. Hawala comes from the 
Arabic word meaning "change" or "transform," and is defined as a bill of exchange or a 
promissory note. In South Asia it is called hundi and is derived from the Sanskrit root 
meaning "collect." It has the same meaning as hawala, i.e., a bill of exchange or 
promissory note, but adds the connotation of "trust." Hawala predates traditional or 
western banking in South Asia, and was first introduced in Calcutta when the British 
established the Bank of Hindustan in 1770. A hawala operator is known as a hawaladar 
and that of a hundi as hundiwala. Essentially hawala is a remittance system employed as 
an alternative or a parallel to traditional or western banking practices. There are several 
other similar systems such as the "chop" or "chit" in China. Together, they are often 
referred to as "underground banking," but in fact they usually operate in the open with 
complete legitimacy, and their services are widely publicized. What distinguishes 
hawala from other systems of remittance is the importance of "trust" and the extensive 
use of connections such as family, ethnic, regional, or business partnerships Unlike 
traditional banking or even the "chop" system hawala uses only minimal or no negotiable 
instruments, but it is a very big business. The German Finance Ministry has estimated 
that the global annual volume of hawala cash transfers today is over $200 billion. [1361 

Hawala works by transferring money without actually moving it, and to understand 
hawala it is best to follow a single such transfer. Muhammad had arrived in the USA 
from Dubai on a tourist visa that has long since expired after he got a job driving a taxi 
in New York. As a cabby he has saved $5,000 that he wants to send to his brother, 
Faisal, now living in Riyadh. His first thought is a major bank, where he learns several 
lessons as to how traditional banks transfer money. The bank would prefer he open an 
account, but Muhammad demurs, for he has no social security number. The bank will 
still transfer his cash but will sell him Saudi riyals at the official rate of 3.75 riyals to the 



dollar and charge $25 to issue a bank draft for 18,750 riyals. There will be an additional 
charge of $40.00 for overnight courier service, for surface mail is unreliable and time 
consuming. Muhammad believes he can get a better deal through hawala. "For many 
people in remote areas of the world, the nearly untraceable hawala system is faster, 
cheaper and more reliable than Citibank. " [1371 He reads in a local Arabic newspaper an 
advertisement by the "Music Bazaar and Travel Services Agency" in Queens offering 
cheap tickets, great deals in riyals, movie rentals, video conversions, and pager and 
cellular activations. Such advertisements are very common in ethnic newspapers. 
Muhammad calls and speaks with Abdullah, who charges 5 percent to handle the 
transaction but offers an exchange rate of 4 00 riyals to the dollar (20,000 riyals) with 
the cost of delivery included. He decides to do business with Abdullah, to whom he gives 
his $5,000 in cash. Abdullah then contacts hawaladar Salim in Riyadh by phone or fax, 
although e-mail is becoming more common. Salim arranges to have 20,000 riyals 
delivered to Faisal the next day. 

This simple example contains all the vital elements of a hawala transaction. First, there 
is trust between Muhammad and Abdullah, who does not give Muhammad a receipt, for 
he does not record individual remittances, only recording for his own purposes how 
much he owes Salim. Abdullah trusts Salim to make the payment to Faisal - invariably in 
person - the next day, no later. Abdullah and Salim have done business many times and 
both belong to a hawala network operating on connections that are constructed in 
several possible ways. One possibility is that Abdullah and Salim are business partners 
or do business on a regular basis, and hawala is just another part of their business 
dealings with one another. A second possibility is that for whatever reasons Salim owes 
Abdullah money. Consequently, Salim is simply repaying his debt to Abdullah by paying 
his hawala customers. This is an informal relationship, but one of the most typical for 
hawala. A third possibility is that Abdullah has a "riyal surplus" in Riyadh and Salim is 
helping him dispose of it. In the last two cases Salim does not have to recover any 
money by simply repaying a debt to Abdullah or handling money that Abdullah has 
entrusted to him. In the first case when Abdullah and Salim are business partners a 
more formal means of balancing accounts is necessary. There are numerous ways to 
accomplish this, but the most common is an import-export business in which Abdullah 
imports CDs and cassettes of Arab music, gold, and jewelry from Salim and exports 
from New York telecommunications equipment to him. To pay Salim, Abdullah simply 
"under-invoices" a shipment of telecommunications equipment to Salim valued at 
$20,000 but invoiced for $15,000 so that the "extra value of goods" Salim will receive 
from the sale of the equipment, in this case $5,000, is the equivalent Abdullah owes 
Salim. The manipulation of invoices is one of the most common means to settle 
accounts. 

Consumers primarily use hawala because it is cost effective and provides its clients 
with considerable savings. Most hawaladars operate out of a rented storefront, not a 
bank building. They may share space with another business, such as a sari or gold 
shop, or work from a table in a tea shop. Their employees receive no health insurance 
and no retirement benefits. Nevertheless, hawala is incredibly efficient: remittances 
never take more than two days, in contrast to a week or so required by international 
wire transfers to corresponding banks, which are closed on weekends and holidays, 
and operate in different time zones. Moreover, hawala is more reliable than traditional 
international transactions, which can become frustratingly complex when they involve 
the client's local bank, its correspondent's bank, the main office of the foreign bank, and 



then the branch office of the recipient's foreign bank. It is not unusual for large 
commercial transactions to get lost "in transit" for weeks. Those who use hawala remain 
anonymous, for there is virtually no paper: the hawaladar gives no receipts, keeps no 
accounts, except what he owes or is owed by his correspondent. In addition, hawala 
permits the hawaladar to engage in foreign-exchange speculation or black-market 
currency dealing, which also enables him to turn a profit, for a hawaladar can always 
offer better exchange rates than banks. Obviously, none of this would work without 
complete trust by all parties. 

Following Indian and Pakistani usage those who use hawala distinguish between "white 
hawala" to describe legitimate transactions such as the one by Muhammad the cab 
driver and "black hawala," which refers to illegitimate transactions, specifically 
money-laundering for illegal activities: narcotics, fraud, terrorism. Hawala can be used 
in any one of three ways to launder money: "placement," "layering," and "integration." 
"Placement" is the problem of how to introduce large amounts of cash into the financial 
system, since some jurisdictions require financial institutions to report cash transactions 
over a certain amount; in the USA it is $10,000. Hawala effectively provides a means for 
placement of large amounts of cash. Most hawaladars have a business in which they 
make deposits into their business accounts that enables them to justify large deposits as 
the proceeds of a legitimate business or use some of the cash to meet business 
expenses. "Layering" takes place when the money-launderer manipulates the illicit funds 
to create legitimacy by transferring money from one account to another. No matter how 
careful and complicated the manner in which this is done, it can raise suspicions in the 
traditional banking system and be reported as such. Hawala, however, leaves a very 
sparse trail if any. Even when under-invoicing is used, the mixture of legal goods and 
illegal money, confusion about "valid prices," and complexities of international shipping 
make the trail much safer than a wire transfer. "Integration" is the means by which the 
money-launderer invests the money in his legitimate assets, consumes it for pleasure, 
or reinvests it in illegal activities. Hawala, consequently, becomes ideal for the 
integration of money by transforming illegal cash into legitimate money that can be 
easily reinvested in a legitimate business, a financial shell, or a seemingly legitimate 
front for illegal activities. [1381 

Although the basic principles of hawala are quite simple, the complexity ascribed to it 
is produced by the infinite number of variations in its execution. The most consistent 
indicators of hawala activity are hawaladar bank accounts that betray significant 
deposits in cash and checks, usually in the three major financial centers known to be 
involved in hawala: the UK, Switzerland, and Dubai. The Dubai Al Barakaat Bank, which 
should not be confused with the Dallah Al Baraka Exchange LLC, was a noted hawala 
enterprise whose founder and director was Ahmed Nur Ali Jumale. Jumale had begun 
his career as a hawaladar in Saudia Arabia in the 1970s and met Osama bin Laden 
during the war in Afghanistan, during which the two had forged a strong personal 
friendship. In 1988 he opened an Al Barakaat Bank in Somalia. A decade later Al 
Barakaat was a sophisticated company providing hawala services whose extensive 
transfers amounted to some $500 million a year. Through Al Barakaat Osama bin Laden 
could transmit intelligence and instructions to Al Qaeda terrorist cells. In addition Al 
Barakaat skimmed millions of dollars which it turned over to Al Qaeda, and it managed, 
invested, and distributed its funds On 8 November 2001 it was placed on the US list of 
institutions supporting terrorism, and the USA and UAE seized Al Barakaat's assets and 



records. The fears that Al Qaeda had disguised its banking transactions by using 
alternative means to those of traditional banking, especially the hawala, led western 
investigators down many unknown financial pathways. The systematic exploration of the 
financial labyrinth of the hawaladar world started at the conference of banking experts 
and government officials held in UAE in May 2002. That meeting has led to more strict 
licensing and regulation of hawaladars operating in such far removed places as Dubai, 
India, and the USA. 

Continuing bank scrutiny 

Crucial to the FATF crackdown on money-laundering were directives issued in 
October 2001 designed to criminalize the financing of terrorism, terrorist acts, and 
terrorist organizations. Within days some sixty governments had adopted blocking 
mechanisms. Russia was among the most determined. It had long argued that the 
Beirut-Ryad Bank of Lebanon, founded in 1958 by Saudi and Lebanese principals, 
including then Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Saud Ibn Abdul Aziz, had been 
responsible for tunneling funds to the IIRO and WAMY operating in Chechnya and 
Daghestan. Russia claimed that its modern mastermind was Shaykh Saleh Kameal, 
whose name had appeared on the Golden Chain list. Kameal's influence could be traced 
from the Dallah Al Baraka through the Al Shamal Islamic Bank to the Jordan Islamic 
Bank, Iqraa International Foundation, and other institutions. By Islamic banking 
standards Beirut-Ryad was quite small, maintaining only twelve branches including a 
London office. Nonetheless, Russia believed that from the early 1990s it had been a 
fundamental instrument in assisting the growth of Islamist movements in Central Asia. Its 
role, according to the Russian intelligence service, was part of a "grandiose plan" 
directed against Russia, and which visualized the eventual merging of former Soviet 
republics into a Great Islamic Caliphate. n 391 Elsewhere, the Jordan-based Arab Bank 
Pic, which operated in thirty nations and computed assets of some $27 billion, also 
received close scrutiny as investigators recognized it as a special favorite for tunneling 
money from Iran, and the Damascus headquarters of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, to 
Palestinian jihadists in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Following 9/11 the investigation of the Arab Bank's links to terrorist financing extended 
beyond the Middle East to Europe; according to court documents filed in Spain, an Al 
Qaeda cell that had helped prepare the 9/11 attacks used the bank to wire money form 
Spain to associates in Pakistan and Yemen. In August 2005 the US Department of the 
Treasury imposed a fine of $24 million on the Arab Bank's New York City branch for 
'systemic' failures to operate in accordance with the anti-money-laundering systems 
and controls demanded by the United States Bank Secrecy Act. The fine was an 
indication that in the USA the close observation of Muslim banks and banking practices 
would continue indefinitely. 



Chapter 4 Afghanistan beginnings 



Modern Islamic movements don't believe in schools of jurisprudence, they don't 
define themselves as Shia, or Sunna, or of this Sufi order or that Sufi order. They 
don't want to break with history altogether, but they want to go forward and develop. 

Hasan al-Turabi, Madrid, 2 August 1994 



The beginnings of most Islamist revolutionary movements can be attributed to the 
Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. In Riyadh the royal family 
leadership was quick to support the mujahideen, and after the meeting of the 
Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Pakistan in January 1980 Saudi 
money began to mobilize Muslim world opinion against the Soviets. To be sure, there 
were secular Muslim revolutionaries in Palestine, militant Islamists in the city streets of 
Egypt, and the attenuated belligerent offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, but none of 
these possessed the commitment, the passion, or the ferocity of the Salafist cells that 
were forged in the crucible of Afghanistan. The inchoate revolutionary movements that 
later emerged in Algeria, Bosnia, the Philippines, Chechnya, and Central Asia were 
invariably the ideological offspring of those Islamists who had fought for Islam against 
infidel communists in the Afghan war led by a hard core of intellectual clerics and 
professionals and their Afghan-Arab mujahideen. At the end of the war most them 
surreptitiously returned to their countries of origin where they founded or joined Islamist 
groups committed to overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamist state, but 
a handful of these pioneer jihadists remained in Peshawar, committed to a worldwide 
Islamist revolution. 



Al Qaeda 

Between 17 and 20 August 1988 Osama bin Laden had led an intense discourse 
among his followers on the following proposition: "Is [our organization] to serve the 
governments or the Arabs?" They chose the Arabs and founded Al Qaeda ("The Base") 
to lead the Arab Islamist revolution by jihad. At these beginnings there were only thirty 
brothers who met the leadership's strict "requirements," to commit themselves to Salafist 
ideology. The Salafiyya movement was largely the work of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani 
(1838-1897), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), and Rashid Rida (1865-1935), who 
attributed the decline of Islamic societies in contrast to the West to the fact that 
contemporary Muslims had abandoned the original teachings of the Prophet. Thus, the 
salafa (forefathers, Salafists) sought to restore the greatness of the Islamic world by the 
creation of states ruled by scripture, the Quran and Sunna, and strict adherence to the 
founders of the four medieval schools of Muslim law: Hanafite, Malikite, Shafi'ite, and 
Hanbalite. Moreover, the Shari'a should be reinterpreted following two fundamental 
principles - maslaha (the public interest), and talfiq ("patching"), whereby the sources 
of Islamic law can be drawn from any of the four schools and not as in the past from just 



one. Above all, Salafists Insisted that Islam was Arab and its language Arabic. Although 
traditional Salafists believed that it is not permissible for Muslims to overthrow a Muslim 
ruler no matter how cruel, incompetent, or secular, contemporary Salafist Islamist 
jihadists have contemptuously rejected this belief. [1401 




Map 1 The Peshawar-AI Qaeda nexus 



Clandestine by design, Al Qaeda was only made open to those who swore the 
traditional oath of loyalty, the bay'a. Each was given an alias using Abu as a first name 
followed by a descriptor, e.g. Abu al-Kanadi (Abu the Canadian). [1411 In fact, the name 
"al-Qaeda" appears not to have been used by Osama bin Laden or other members until 
it became widely employed by the CIA and then the media. Al Qaeda had broad roots, 
for its members came from the larger circle of Afghan-Arabs who had come to Pakistan 
from all over the Arab world, but particularly from the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria 
and EIJ, which worked closely with another Egyptian revolutionary movement, Jama'at 
al-lslamiyya, rapidly emerging from its moribund Muslim Brotherhood chrysalis. The 
gestation of Al Qaeda had taken more than two decades and involved three Afghans 
educated in the 1960s - Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, who had 
studied at Al Azhar University in Cairo, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, educated in 
Afghanistan. Within a year of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union they led 



the three most resolute mujahideen forces in the jihad against the Russians. They were 
acquainted with one another and had in common their reverence for the writings of the 
deceased Egyptian and Salafist intellectual Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). Sayyid Qutb had 
been a literary critic in Cairo when he journeyed to the USA in 1948, where he 
remained for two years, during which time he was appalled at the moral and spiritual 
degeneracy of the West - even castigating the fundamentalist Christian churches for 
the laxity between men and women. Thoroughly radicalized he returned to Egypt, joined 
the Muslim Brothers in 1951, repudiated his earlier more secular publications, and 
rejected everything western, including the royal Egyptian government and after 1952 its 
secular successor, Gamal Abdel Nasser. [142l His outspoken views against the 
theological corruption of the secular revolutionary government of Egypt made him 
anathema to Nasser, and he was arrested in 1954 during a purge of the Muslim 
Brotherhood. 

In prison Qutb was horrified by the barbaric treatment of the devout Muslim prisoners 
by Muslim guards, but during the next eleven years of imprisonment he had ample time 
to reflect and develop his ideas, which he published in a prodigious outpouring of 
religious polemics that were widely read. He not only produced his thirty-volumefi Zilal 
al-Ouran (In the Shade of the Quran), committed to the "unconditional demands" of 
Salafism, but the book that had much greater influence, Ma'aallim Fittareek 
(Milestones), published in 1965. Although a thin volume compared to In the Shade of the 
Quran. Milestones was the principal proof used by the prosecution in his trial and 
subsequent hanging in 1966. It was later translated into English and published in 
Damascus in 1980, by which time, however, it had become "a classic manifesto of the 
terrorist wing of Islamic fundamentalism. " [1431 His works filled an ideological vacuum for 
the Muslim Brothers that had existed since the assassination of Hasan al-Banna in 1949. 

His radical contribution to Islamic jurisprudence was his justification for Muslims, in 
certain circumstances, to assassinate a Muslim ruler, which had hitherto been strictly 
forbidden in Islam. He argued that any ruler of a Muslim nation who does not firmly 
implement Muslim law, Shari'a, is not a true Muslim but - even worse - an infidel, kafirin, 
who can be killed with impunity. Sayyid Qutb relied on the writings of an early Salafist, 
Ibn Taymiyya (1268-1328), who wrote a treatise advocating the same reasoning when 
the Mongols invaded Muslim territory and many Arabs fell under the tyrannical rule of 
Mongol rulers. He skillfully equated Ibn Taymiyya's struggles against Mongol rulers with 
his own condemnation of the Nasser regime in Egypt. Moreover, Qutb redefined the 
Islamic concept of jahiliyya, which hitherto had referred to the time before the 
revelations of Muhammad as a period of "ignorance." Qutb now adopted the terminology 
of Abu al-'Ala al-Maududi (1903-1979) to call jahiliyya "barbarism," to be destroyed by 
true Muslims who had not compromised their belief in the all-powerful oneness of God. 
Applying this concept to contemporary times, he argued that secular society by its 
implementation of non-Islamic laws had overridden the wishes of God and violated His 
sovereignty. He was, in effect, providing an ideological framework whereby Muslims 
could use the principles of Islam rather than dictatorships, democracy, socialism, or 
communism in the holy war against these secular and unjust governments. Fifteen years 
after his death, in 1981, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by the Salafist 
Lieutenant Khalid Ahmad Shawki al-lslambuli of the Islamist Jama'at al-Jihad (Society of 
Struggle) in 1981. 

Not surprisingly, Sayyid Qutb deplored the corruption of one of the five pillars of Islam, 



zakat, by the dearth of any definition as to who should collect and distribute this 
charitable giving. He argued that in order to meet the demands of the bayt al-mal (the 
state treasury), the government should collect the za/caf and distribute it to the poor. His 
opponents argued that such a procedure was not Islamic but socialistic, for traditionally 
Muslim governments refrained from interfering in the payment of zakat and zakat 
al-amwal al-batina, gold, silver, and commercial goods that can "be hidden," and 
therefore zakat al-amwal al-batina can be given only if the donor does so voluntarily, 
without coercion for its distribution by the government. Qutb dismissed these arguments 
with derision. To him zakat was a tax, and since the government collects the nation's 
taxes, so too must it collect zakat, including zakat al-amwal al-batina. He radicalized the 
traditional Islamic concept of zakat as a charitable gift that takes place between two 
individuals face to face, arguing that it is not an individual gift or alms that are passed 
over from hand to hand, but a tax paid to the government. His concept of charitable 
giving did not stop with zakat, for he also insisted that Islamic governments should also 
manage awqaf. To him the wishes of the deceased for the use of the waqf were 
subordinate compared to the obligations of the Muslim state to advance the fundamental 
tenets of Islam. Indeed, Sayyid Qutb was a Salafist who visualized Islam as a movement 
permanently in the jihad against unjust Muslim governments and their rulers, with zakat 
providing the resources that enabled Islam to wage war against them. There can be little 
doubt why Qutb was "regarded as the father of modern [Islamic] fundamentalism. "[144] 



Qutb and the Afghans 

It is not surprising that Qutb was the single most important Islamic influence upon the 
Afghan leaders Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, and Gulbuddin 
Hekmatyar in their struggles against the Soviet invaders. Burhanuddin Rabbani was 
born in the rugged Badakhshan Province of Afghanistan where he attended school 
before going to the Darul-uloom-e-Sharia (the Abu Hanifa religious school) in Kabul. 
From Abu Hanifa Rabbani became a student in the school of law and theology at Kabul 
University for the next four years, where he was deeply influenced by the writings of 
both Qutb and Sayyid Abu al-'Ala al-Maududi, a contemporary of Hasan al-Banna. 
Invited to join the faculty at the university as professor in 1963, he sought further study 
at Al Azhar University in 1966 where he received his master's degree in Islamic 
philosophy two years later and returned to Kabul University. Here he was given the task 
of organizing the university students, and among his contemporaries he was the most 
intellectually accomplished, having translated Qutb into Dari, an Afghan version of Farsi 
(Persian) and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. By his learning, works, 
and active support for Islam he was selected head of the High Council of the 
Jama'at-i-lslami (Islamic Society) Party of Afghanistan in 1972, whose outspoken 
demands for an Islamic state led to an attempt to arrest him in 1974. With the help of his 
students he eluded the police and escaped to Pakistan where he converted the 
Jama'at-i-lslami into a successful mujahideen fighting unit. 

Like Burhanuddin Rabbani, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf earned a degree in religion from 
Kabul University and then traveled to Al Azhar where he too earned a master's degree in 
religion. During his Cairo years he was much influenced by the writings of Sayyid Qutb, 
and even more than Rabbani adopted a fierce hatred for the West and the USA. 



Returning to Afghanistan in 1969 he founded, with Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 
the radical Akhwan-ul-Muslimen in Afghanistan, which had strong ties with the Muslim 
Brotherhood. Although not the intellectual equal of Rabbani, he was certainly his military 
superior, organizing the Pashtun Ittihad-i-lslam-Baraye Azadi Afghanistan (the Islamic 
Alliance to Liberate Afghanistan) which under his leadership became one of the most 
successful mujahideen militias in the Afghan war. Numerous disciples of Abdul Sayyaf 
were to play dominant roles in spreading Salafism throughout Muslim Southeast Asia. 

Another Pashtun, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, was originally from Baghlan and first studied 
at the military academy but switched in 1968 to the engineering department of Kabul 
University. Although he is sometimes referred to as "Engineer Hekmatyar," he never 
graduated from the university, becoming an outspoken member of the People's 
Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a Communist Party of the Parchami and 
Khalqi groups. In 1972 he was imprisoned for killing a Maoist student, escaped, and fled 
to Pakistan where he abandoned the communists to become a devout Muslim and 
founded Hezb-i-lslami (Islamic Party). He subsequently received financial assistance 
and extensive training from the Americans and the Inter-Service Intelligence Agency 
(ISI) of Pakistan, which provided Hekmatyar and his Hezb-i-lslami with millions of 
dollars of military and financial aid. Usually described by Pakistani officials as "power 
hungry, cunning, and a ruthless fanatic," he could count on 30,000 dedicated 
mujahideen and support from Pakistan's Jama'at-i-lslami movement, the Islamic 
Resistance Party of Tajikistan, Islamists in Kashmir, and the Hizb-i-Wahdat, a 
mujahideen collection of nine Shi'a groups in Iran. 

The USA was slow to react to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, preferring to wait on 
events and observe rather than act. This passive policy soon changed after the election 
of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1981. He was determined to build up the USA 
armed forces and undermine where possible Soviet interventions throughout the world, 
and Afghanistan was a top priority. The Special Coordination Committee of his National 
Security Council (NSC) recommended that the USA give financial and military 
assistance to the "Peshawar Seven" that comprised the original Afghan resistance. 
These seven groups together with a host of independent mujahideen forces had been 
the creation of ISI and its director, the Pakistani General Hamid Gul. Washington 
supplied the cash and the weapons and was not about to question arms deliveries to 
militant Islamists, for they were the highly motivated mujahideen who usually fought 
fiercely. In Afghanistan the need was for short-term results with little thought given to the 
aftermath of a Soviet withdrawal. Little or no consideration was given to the fact that 
Hekmatyar had close ties with Iran, or that the forces of Abdul Rasul Sayyf would seek 
Islamist revolutions throughout Southeast Asia. [1451 

Declaring Pakistan a "frontline state" in the war against Soviet aggression, the USA 
tunneled its financial support and military aid, particularly the deadly Stinger anti-aircraft 
missiles, to the mujahideen from operational centers in Islamabad and Cairo. President 
Anwar Sadat, and, after his assassination in 1981, President Hosni Mubarak provided 
camps and equipment to train mujahideen, and arms for mujahideen in Afghanistan 
were flown to Pakistan from Egyptian military airfields. Saudi Arabia contributed 
hundreds of millions of dollars annually through a secret bank account held jointly with 
the CIA in Switzerland. The British Special Air Service (SAS) worked closely with ISI in 
Pakistan to train mujahideen, and at the end of the war in 1989 over 10,000 
Afghan-Arabs had been housed, fed, and given medical treatment from a host of Islamic 



charities. In the end more than $4 billion had been provided by the USA and Saudi 
Arabia alone for the war in Afghanistan. [1461 How much of that money was tunneled 
through Islamic charities will never be known, but it was substantial. 



Emir of Jihad 

When Soviet forces crossed the Afghanistan frontier, Dr. Abdullah Azzam 
(1941-1989) was one of the first Arabs to join the Afghan jihad, where he was known as 
Shaykh Abdullah Azzam. Born in the village of Ass-ba'ah in Palestine in 1941, Azzam 
was reared in a humble, pious home. He was a precocious child whose abilities were 
recognized and nurtured in the village schools. The youngest graduate from Khadorri 
Agricultural College, he taught in a village school in South Jordan. His piety convinced 
him to seek religious training at the Shari'a College of Damascus University where he 
obtained a bachelor's degree in Islamic law in 1966. Deeply angered by the Israeli 
capture of the West Bank in 1967 he fled to Jordan and joined the jihad against the 
Israeli occupation. When that jihad collapsed, he fled to Egypt and graduated with a 
master's degree in Islamic law from Al Azhar University. Returning to Jordan in 1970 he 
accepted a teaching position at the University of Jordan in Amman, but having won a 
scholarship he returned the following year to Al Azhar where he obtained his doctorate 
in the "Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence" in 1973. During his years in Egypt he was a 
frequent visitor at the home of the deceased Sayyid Qutb. 

During the 1970s Azzam rejoined the Palestinian jihad, but he became increasingly 
disillusioned when he discovered that the Palestinians did not regard their revolution as 
inspired by religion. His compatriots appeared more interested in cards and music than 
liberating Palestine. One day "he rhetorically asked one of the 'mujahidin' what the 
religion behind the Palestinian revolution was, to which the man replied, quite clearly 
and bluntly, 'This revolution has no religion behind it.'" As a Muslim Brother committed to 
jihad, this revelation convinced him to abandon the Palestinians. His vocal opposition to 
the secular policies of the university soon made him unwelcome, and he fled to Saudi 
Arabia and a professorial appointment at King Abdul Aziz University with the deep 
conviction that only by means of organized force could the Islamist state be established. 
Jihad and the gun became his way of life, a life devoted to a single goal: the restoration 
of the caliphate and the "establishment of Allah's Rule on earth." Borrowing much from 
Sayyid Qutb, Azzam's Islamist state would be ruled by a theocrat devoted to the pure 
faith; a man who would unite the attributes of an imam (theologian) and an amir (political 
and military commander). In the Islamist state corruption would be eliminated and only 
the zakat, authorized by the Quran, would be collected by the government as a tax. He 
preached that every Muslim had two obligations - jihad and the obligation to "arouse" 
the believers. Jihad was the path to "everlasting glory" and was not to be abandoned 
until the "occupied lands" were restored, the "oppressed peoples" freed, and "Allah 
alone" worshiped by all mankind; that was to be accomplished by the gun: "One hour 
spent fighting in the Path of Allah is worth more than seventy years spent in praying at 
home. " [1471 

In 1979 he and his family moved first to Islamabad, where he had accepted a post at 
the university shortly before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then later to 
Peshawar sixty miles from the Afghan border in the Northwest Frontier Province of 



Pakistan. There he administered the activities of MWL until his assassination in 1989 
He began his personal effort to support jihad by opening a storefront, the Bayt 
Ashuhada (House of Martyrs) in Peshawar, as a one-man welcoming committee, and 
was soon overwhelmed when the trickle of arriving Arab jihadists became a flood. In 
order to accommodate hundreds of mujahideen recruits he established the famous 
Maktab al-Khadamat al-Mujahidin al-Arab (Mujahideen Services Bureau, MAK) in 1982 
to offer all possible assistance to the mujahideen; it eventually became the headquarters 
of Al Qaeda. Azzam also gave refuge to hundreds of radical mullahs from the Arabian 
Peninsula who were bent on purifying the faithful while spreading Wahhabi theology: no 
fellowship with Christians, Jews, or other kafirin - not in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or 
elsewhere. In Peshawar he became famous for his many declarations in the mosque on 
the justification for the jihad and honored by the sobriquet the "Emir of Jihad" for his 
Friday sermons. 



Never shall I leave the Land of Jihad, except in three circumstances. Either I shall be 
killed in Afghanistan. Either I shall be killed in Peshawar. Or either I shall be handcuffed 
and expelled from Pakistan. 



I feel that I am nine years old: seven-and-a-half years in the Afghan jihad, and 
one-and-a-half years in the Jihad in Palestine, and the rest of the years have no value. 



Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah (SWT) Alone is worshipped. Jihad continues 
until Allah's Word is raised high. Jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed. Jihad to 
protect our dignity and restore our occupied land. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory. 



As the director of MWL in Peshawar he was employed coordinating the activities of 
Islamic relief agencies, whose vehicles were often used to transport mujahideen and 
arms from one province to another along the eastern frontier, including trucks of IIRO, 
whose administrator in Peshawar, Talaat Fouad Abdul Qasim, a member of EIJ, had 
been sentenced to death in absentia by an Egyptian court. IIRO was a self-proclaimed, 
sophisticated humanitarian organization pledged to "alleviate human suffering 
worldwide" by providing support to the Afghan-Arab mujahideen in the field and to their 
families in the camps. The Dar al-Mal al-lslami Bank, the Dallah Al Baraka Bank, and 
BCCI, which had offices in Lahore and Peshawar, tunneled the necessary funds to 
twenty non-government organizations (NGOs) operating in Pakistan, the "most famous 
of which was the IIRO. " [148] The Red Crescent, Islamic Da'wa, and the Lajnat al-Birr 
al-lslamiyya (The Islamic Benevolence Committee, IBC) were all very active providing 
support for the mujahideen. 

By the mid-1980s Peshawar had been overrun by Islamist agencies, including thirteen 



major charities and a plethora of minor ones such as the shadowy Islamic African Relief 
Agency (IARA), founded in Sudan to support Arab mujahideen. To bring order from this 
chaos and competition the Islamist assembly of Peshawar headed by Azzam created an 
Islamic Coordinating Council (ICC) to sort out who would do what for whom, but by 
1984 Shaykh Abdullah Azzam had begun to neglect his directorship of MWL in order to 
spend more time raising funds for MAK. As for Azzam himself, he saw clearly the path 
to follow: "It is also possible for loftier models, people with mature abilities and wiser, 
more mindful propagators to come to the land of jihad. Thousands of such people could 
bring about a tremendous revolution in the reality of Afghanistan, and in the inhabited 
regions thereafter Those thousands may change history. " H 491 

As his Friday sermons became more strident and implacable in the cause of jihad so 
too did his enemies in the government of Pakistan and among the rival mujahideen 
factions. In mid-1989 a bomb planted beneath his pulpit for his Friday sermon in the 
mosque failed to explode, but on 24 November while he was driving to the mosque with 
his two sons his car stopped momentarily on the road in time for a planted bomb to 
destroy the car and its occupants. It is said that Shaykh Abdullah Azzam was found 
whole but dead with only a trickle of blood befitting the martyrdom he seemed to crave. 
The charitable said that ISI did him in; the uncharitable that it was the CIA. 



The Peshawar Connection 


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Osama bin Laden and MAK 



By 1982 Azzam was managing numerous projects in Peshawar, among them MAK. As 
director of MWL for Pakistan he was presumably responsible also for supplying food 
and shelter for some of the more than 1.4 million Afghan refugees that had arrived in 
Pakistan by 1981. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans lived in ramshackle camps around 
Peshawar, the first of which was Akora Khattak, a city of tents and mud huts in a barren 
desert erected mostly by Islamic charities. During the flood crest of refugees the camp 
city held over 250,000 people d 501 Although it appears that Azzam took little interest in 
refugees, he used MWL as a cover for a very different charity that began as a 
guesthouse for Afghan-Arabs which was protected by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his 
Hezb-i-lslami. Hekmatyar himself had a house nearby, and when Azzam traveled 
through Afghanistan he was accompanied by Hekmatyar's guards. When Osama bin 
Laden arrived in Peshawar in December 1979, he went first to see Azzam, his former 
teacher at King Abdul Aziz University, who had had a profound influence on the 
formation of Osama's ideas concerning jihad Osama bin Laden was an energetic, 
inquisitive twenty-two-year-old much too young and inexperienced to be given 
organizational command of any aspect of the jihad, but under the patronage of Azzam 
and the protection of his mujahideen Bin Laden was able to obtain a thorough 
understanding of the role of the jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

At Peshawar the decision was made to receive recruits for advanced military training 
at the Al Qaeda al-Askariya (Military Base) outside Peshawar, while Bin Laden 
personally took charge of the finances, including a dependable relief agency (Hay'at 
al-lgatha) to manage donations collected by the brothers as well as the funds given by 
legitimate Islamic charities ostensibly for strictly humanitarian reasons. The first 
important task Azzam assigned to Bin Laden was to assist him in establishing "the Sidda 
camp for the training of Arab Mujahideen who came for Jihad in Afghanistan" to be 
followed by the construction of a second training base, the Ma'sadat al-Ansar (Lion's 
Den), inside Afghanistan. [1511 There was little reason at this time for US intelligence 
agents to pay attention to Bin Laden, for construction was his business and that of his 
family. Milton Bearden, who ran the covert actions of the CIA in Afghanistan from 1986 
to 1989, knew of Bin Laden but claimed the CIA "had no relationship with him" and 
presumably no suspicion of his motives, for he was donating innocuous heavy 
machinery and was only one of many raising funds for the same cause as the 
CIA. H521 Dr. Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi physician and director of the Movement for 
Islamic Reform in Arabia, which had supported Bin Laden, claimed that during his early 
years in Afghanistan, "nobody noticed that he was there. " H 531 During his frequent visits 
to Saudi Arabia he preached jihad in the mosques, collected funds to support the war 
effort, and sold cassettes in which he urged the youth to take up jihad. When in 
Peshawar Osama stayed in Azzam's guesthouse where he helped in planning for the 
administration of MAK, the organization that inspired him to found Al Qaeda. 

Azzam was never a rich man, and consequently he welcomed financial support from 
his wealthy friend. Certainly, Bin Laden was not hesitant in pledging his own resources 
to the movement, and throughout the 1980s his construction company built camps and 



roads, including a secret pathway from the Pakistan frontier to within twenty kilometers 
of Kabul. When he was not constructing camps, Bin Laden was active in collecting 
funds that enabled Azzam to publish magazines and books that urged a call to action, 
including The Defense of Islamic Countries as an Inherent Duty, which soon became the 
Islamist strategy for jihad. Both Bin Laden and Azzam would travel widely seeking 
acolytes for their inchoate jihadist movement, all the while preaching the "mentality of 
///iad." [154l Traveling, printing, and spreading the cause of jihad costs money. The 
government of Saudi Arabia channeled hundreds of millions of dollars to support the 
mujahideen through secret bank accounts in Switzerland. Prince Turki al-Faisal, who 
directed Saudi Arabia's intelligence apparatus from 1976 to 2001, admitted that he had 
personally met Osama bin Laden four or five times in the 1980s, but he has been 
conspicuously silent about Azzam. [1551 "Money flowed into the Service Bureau" from 
the Muslim Brotherhood, "but the heaviest funding" came from Saudi Arabia - some 
directly from the Saudi government, some from mosques, and some from Saudi princes 
and members of the kingdom's financial and business elite. Some believe that Prince 
Turki's relationship with Bin Laden at this time was more than casual, and he worked 
closely with Osama "to coordinate both the fighting and relief efforts." [156l 

There were other contributors to the jihad. Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, Governor of 
Riyadh, was chairman of a committee specifically set up to fund mujahideen. Another 
big donor was the Grand Mufti, Shaykh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, who chaired MWL which 
was even then "the main conduit for Saudi government funds to Islamic cause 
worldwide."! 1571 Both Bin Laden and Azzam realized the importance of having a 
charitable foundation as a front and as an umbrella for Islamist jihadist activities; that 
convinced Bin Laden to found in Saudi Arabia the shadowy Islamic Salvation 
Foundation and its satellite, Al Kifah (Struggle). £158] 



Al Kifah 

Al Kifah (aka Makhtab al-Khadamat/al-Kifah) was the charitable outreach of MAK that 
operated secretly to support the jihad in Afghanistan, and was founded by Bin Laden 
who was its "financial sponsor." When the offices of Al Kifah were opened in Peshawar, 
its activities were kept quite separate from those of MAK, and within five years the 
fundraising ability of Bin Laden, Azzam, and a handful of Islamist companions enabled 
them to open Al Kifah "recruiting offices [for the jihad in Afghanistan] in 35 
countries. "[1591 Between 1985 and 1989 Azzam and his companion, the pudgy Shaykh 
Tamim al-Adnani of Palestine, who would die from a heart attack during a visit to 
Orlando Disney World in 1990, traveled throughout the USA seeking both funds and 
recruits. Azzam visited a dozen cities, raised funds, enlisted mujahideen, and held an 
open forum to meet other Muslims and jihadists active in the USA. In 1988 he attended 
the First Conference of Jihad held at the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn where Al Kifah 
Refugee Services had a small office, the Al Kifah Refugee Center, which was the work 
of Egyptian Islamist militants Mustafa Rahman and Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman, the 
latter well known as the "spiritual leader" of the Egyptian Jama'at al-lslamiyya (Islamic 
Group) revolutionary movement. They opened the Center in 1987 ostensibly to provide 
financial assistance for orphans and widows of jihadists, but in fact they recruited some 
200 jihadists to fight in Afghanistan. Al Kifah offices were gradually opened in every 



country in the Middle East, Great Britain, France, Germany, and throughout 
Scandinavia as well as in thirty US cities. [1601 

Some have claimed that there were only "three people outside the US government who 
ever knew exactly what role Al Kifah really played [in the United States]." One was 
Azzam; the second was Mustafa Shalabi, Azzam's confidante and Al Kifah director in 
Pakistan who was murdered in 1991, and the third was Osama bin Laden. [1611 There 
was, however, another man who most likely knew a great deal about the activities of the 
Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn: Dr. Ayman al-Zawahin, the rabid anti-American 
and leader of the clandestine Egyptian Talaa al-Fateh (Vanguards of Conquest), a 
small, clandestine organization that had historical ties to both the Muslim Brotherhood 
and EIJ. A radical Islamist movement, its members were involved in the assassination of 
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. 



Ayman al-Zawahiri 

Hundreds of Afghan-Arab jihadists, young and old, followed Bin Laden to MAK. Some 
were drawn to the war by Al Jihad, a magazine published by MAK that openly recruited 
mujahideen for the war; others were inspired to serve by appeals, subtle and fierce, in 
mosques during the Friday sermon. Among those who arrived in Peshawar was Dr. 
Ayman al-Zawahiri, on the run from the Egyptian authorities. He seemed a most unlikely 
mujahid. When Dr. Rabie al-Zawahiri and his wife Umayma moved with their son 
Ayman to Maadi, a middle-class suburb of Cairo, in 1960, they belonged to two of the 
most prominent families in Egypt. The Zawahiri clan comprised an Egyptian medical 
dynasty. Rabie was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University in Cairo as 
one of the thirty-one family members who were doctors, chemists, and pharmacists. 
There were also an ambassador, a judge, and a member of parliament in the extended 
family, but the Zawahiri name had been most closely associated with religion. In 1929 
Ayman's great-uncle Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri became the Grand Imam of Al 
Azhar University, the historical center of Islamic learning, where his great- and 
great-great-grandfathers had been Islamic scholars. Moreover, his mother, Umayma 
Azzam, was also from a distinguished, wealthy, and somewhat notorious clan. Her 
father was the President of Cairo University, founder of the King Saud University in 
Riyadh, and at various times the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, Yemen, and Saudi 
Arabia. Her great-uncle had been the first Secretary-General of the Arab League, and 
her uncle, Mahfouz Azzam, was a dedicated Egyptian nationalist and was implicated but 
never tried in the assassination of Prime Minister Ahmad Mahir. 

The Zawahiri family, with five children, of whom Ayman and his twin sister Umnya were 
the first born on 19 June 1951, lived modestly on a professor's salary. They were a very 
conservative and religious island in the cosmopolitan and secular life of Maadi. Ayman 
attended the state secondary school, rather than the elite Victoria College, where he 
was an excellent and pious student and following in the family tradition graduated in 
1974 from the University of Cairo Medical School. At fourteen he had joined the Muslim 
Brotherhood and was later implicated in a failed attempt to assassinate Gamal Abdel 
Nasser and imprisoned. Upon his release two years later he joined the outlawed 
fundamentalist EIJ and ultimately became its leader. In the summer of 1980 he was 
working at a Muslim Brotherhood clinic in Cairo when its director "invited" him to take a 



four-month tour in Peshawar caring for Afghan refugees "under the auspices of the Red 
Crescent Society. " [1621 It is not known if Zawahiri met Azzam at this time, but given his 
interests and the limited society of Peshawar, it seems very likely. 

In March 1981 Zawahiri reappeared at Peshawar for two months, working again with 
the Red Crescent. 11631 He returned to Cairo, where a few weeks later he was charged, 
tried, and convicted for the possession of weapons but not for being involved in the plot 
that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. He was sentenced to three years in 
prison. At his trial he had been filmed shouting, "We are Muslims who believe in our 
religion . . . We are here, the real Islamic front and the real Islamic opposition. We're 
trying our best to establish an Islamic state and Islamic society. "[164] Perhaps he was 
not executed because of the Zawahiri name and his influential family, but he did not 
waste his time in jail. His charisma and fluent English earned him an international 
reputation as the spokesman for the imprisoned militant Islamists, and he now had the 
leisure to study the Islamism of the Ayatollah Khomeini and reform EIJ. 

After his release from prison Zawahiri opened a medical clinic in Cairo, but soon 
disappeared. In 1985 he was in Jidda, where he may have met Osama bin Laden. [1651 
He then reappeared in Peshawar again but now as a member of SARCS. He arrived 
back in Cairo in 1986 for a few months before traveling through Saudi Arabia to 
Peshawar, never to return to Egypt. Once again he served as a surgeon but this time for 
the Kuwait Red Crescent, a legitimate employer in the Pakistan borderlands that was 
often used for illicit purposes by the mujahideen. He also opened an office for EIJ in 
Peshawar, and with Ibrahim al-Mekki, a former Egyptian colonel and Islamist who fled 
the country after the Sadat assassination, he transformed EIJ into a true revolutionary, 
clandestine Islamist movement. [166l Among his patients in Peshawar was Osama bin 
Laden, who apparently was suffering from health problems associated with diabetes. 



Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman 

Born in 1937 in the Egyptian Fayoum, Shaykh Abd al-Rahman was blind almost from 
birth. Largely self-educated, his persistence and brilliance earned him admission to Al 
Azhar, where he graduated with a doctorate in religious law and theology He had joined 
the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth, and after graduating from Al Azhar his reputation 
for learning and piety was instrumental in his appointment as "adviser" to the Ikhwan's 
"Guiding Bureau" (Maktab al-lrshad), one of whose responsibilities was to issue fehvas, 
literally legal opinions but often regarded as religious judgments from reputable scholars 
of great trust. Among his subsequent fatwas was one that permitted Afghan-Arab 
mujahideen to assassinate "Muslim opponents in their respective countries who had 
violated the Shariat, or Islamic law." [167l His provocative fatwa was characteristic of the 
blind cleric who had served for years as an alim (adviser, spiritual leader) to Egyptian 
Islamist revolutionaries - the original al-Jihad and to its terrorist offshoots, the Islamic 
Jihad, the New Jihad Group, and the dangerous Vanguards of Conquest, a mysterious 
organization that included Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the radical Jama'at al-lslamiyya. 

Egyptian intelligence was convinced that his fatwa was the justification for EIJ 
assassination of Anwar Sadat. He was arrested, "charged with providing the inspiration 
for the murder," tried three times before being acquitted for lack of evidence, and 
released in 1984. He soon appeared in Peshawar where he became close friends with 



Bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [168l Acting on his advice, 
Jama'at al-lslamiyya sent some 300 mujahideen, including his two sons, to fight 
courageously in Nangarhar Province, and he himself visited the jihadists operating 
inside Afghanistan on numerous occasions. During the next five years he served as the 
chief propagandist for Islamic Jihad in Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Islamic 
centers in Germany, the UK, and Turkey. He made several tours in the USA and 
preached jihad at the Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn where the Afghan Refugee Services 
Inc. at the time was raising funds for mujahideen operations in Peshawar. 

Although the Egyptian authorities could not prevent his return to Egypt, they followed 
his movements, and particularly his sermons in the mosques of Cairo and Upper Egypt. 
Returning to Egypt from his trip to the USA to attend an Islamic conference in 1987, he 
was seized and placed under house arrest for three years. In 1989, while still under 
house arrest, he was charged with inciting a riot in his hometown, Fayoum, and jailed 
for three months, and then tried. He was acquitted for lack of evidence. Upon his 
release, he fled to the USA in 1990. This prompted the Egyptian government to try him 
in absentia, and it succeeded in winning a conviction. [1691 Like Ayman al-Zawahiri, 
Shaykh Omar was determined that the various Egyptian jihadist movements should be 
united; EIJ should join with the Jama'at al-lslamiyya, and those two with the Muslim 
Brotherhood, which had survived clandestinely using the "Da'wa and Shari'a" 
organizations as cover to send Egyptians to Afghanistan. 



Peripatetic mujahideen 

The Soviet departure from Afghanistan was a stunning victory for the Islamists in their 
never-ending jihad against the kalirin. Afghanistan, a small, economically 
underdeveloped country of 15 million people and an army that was a rabble in arms, but 
with strong support from Pakistan and weapons, stinger missiles, and cash from the 
USA, had forced the Soviet Union to abandon the ill-fated mission to expand its 
domination of Central Asia. The jihad, however, was not to end with the Soviet departure 
in 1989. As far as the mujahideen were concerned the jihad remained unfinished, for 
the installation of an Islamist government in Kabul had to be fulfilled. The Marxist 
President Mohammad Najibullah, installed by the Soviets before their departure, realized 
the danger and offered his services to the USA in what he perceived to be "the new 
struggle against the radical Islamic threat." He warned that if the mujahideen captured 
Afghanistan they would turn it into a '"center of world smuggling for narcotic drugs,' and 
a 'center for terrorism. '" [1701 In May 1988 Najibullah had been willing to sign an 
agreement with the UN that would have allowed western aid agencies to operate in those 
regions of Afghanistan not under the control of Kabul as a counterweight to Islamist 
relief agencies supporting the mujahideen, but nothing ever came of his proposal. [1711 
There was also confusion in Peshawar over the meaning of the Soviet departure. 
Unproven rumors circulated that Zawahiri was seeking to "undermine" the role played by 
Shaykh Azzam. Others whispered that Azzam and Bin Laden had fallen out over the 
direction of the Islamist revolution. On the one hand, some thought that Azzam was 
determined to impose an Islamist state upon Afghanistan as a base from which to 
launch attacks against secular governments in the Muslim world. On the other hand, 
some believed that Zawahiri, Bin Laden, and others had lost interest in Afghanistan. 



Although the strength of their infrastructure and connections in Pakistan had 
deteriorated, Al Qaeda continued to use it as a base to attack secular governments in 
Egypt, Yemen, and, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, to infiltrate themselves from 
Pakistan into the new Muslim republics of Central Asia. 

Azzam was determined to gain victory in Afghanistan. Zawahiri was determined to win 
in Egypt. Zawahiri always took the longer view that the purpose of the jihad was to 
replace the governments of major secular states, such as Egypt, with Islamist 
governments rather than become preoccupied with an immediate victory over 
inconsequential states such as Afghanistan. He was prepared to support the worldwide 
Islamist revolution so long as it did not divert his focus on Egypt. Osama bin Laden had 
originally come to Afghanistan to drive out the Soviet invaders, but in Peshawar he fell 
under the influence of both Azzam and Zawahiri and began to consider the founding of 
a movement that, after Afghanistan, would continue the jihad in Algeria, Egypt, and the 
republics of the crumbling Soviet Union. When Shaykh Abdullah Azzam and his two 
sons were killed by a car bomb in November 1989, it was well known that Ayman 
al-Zawahiri had had a falling out with Azzam over philosophical disputes and that Bin 
Laden and Azzam had had an increasing number of heated arguments over 
administrative matters. [172] After the death of Azzam Bin Laden appeared undecided 
whether to remain in Pakistan at MAK, move to Afghanistan, or go elsewhere. When the 
Afghan factions began fighting amongst themselves soon after the Soviet withdrawal and 
the Marxist government in Kabul managed to survive, he turned his back on Afghanistan 
and the mujahideen, perhaps in disgust, and returned to Jidda. Here his interests 
turned to developments in Islamist Iran while his ill-disguised contempt for the Saudi 
royal family earned him the street name "the Saudi ayatollah." It would be only a matter 
of time before he openly clashed with Saudi authorities. 

On the night of 30 June 1989 a select group of Sudanese Islamist army officers in 
Khartoum led by Brigadier Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir overthrew the civilian 
government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. At first their coup d'etat appeared to be 
yet another of the many that have afflicted post-colonial Africa, but within a short time 
the coup became a revolution as the officers installed an Islamist government. The 
Sudan, with one-third of its population non-Muslim and non-Arab, seemed a most 
unlikely country to become the first Islamist state in the Arab world and Africa, but 
Osama bin Laden, unsure of his old MAK base in Peshawar and distrusted in Saudi 
Arabia, opened discussions with the Sudanese revolutionaries in Khartoum. He began 
investing in the Sudan soon after the coup in 1990, and the following year purchased a 
house and a spacious guesthouse in the fashionable Khartoum suburb of Riyadh and a 
farm and stable for his horses south of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. To finance all these 
purchases and conduct business he opened an account and deposited $50 million in 
the Al Shamal Islamic Bank and later other accounts in the Tadamon and Faisal banks 
in Khartoum. His commercial headquarters were located in a nondescript office on Mek 
Nimr Street, and by 1992 Bin Laden had set up two holding companies, Taba 
Investments and Laden International; his Al-Hijra Construction Company employed 600 
Sudanese building the major arterial road from Khartoum to Port Sudan. 

Socially he was a familiar figure around Riyadh, where he quickly established a close 
personal relationship with Hasan al-Turabi who was the ideological patron of the Islamist 
government. He married Turabi's niece as his third wife, and in return Turabi arranged 
for Bin Laden to import construction equipment duty free. Making Khartoum and the 
Sudan his home he and Al Qaeda members moved freely in and out of the country on 



Sudanese passports. His guesthouse was always open to Islamist revolutionaries - 
members of Al Qaeda, Egyptians from Jama'at al-lslamiyya, Algerians from FIS, Libyan 
and Yemeni insurgents, HAMAS - and Bin Laden would hold court on the second-floor 
reception room. On Thursday evenings the Al Qaeda leadership met at the farm where 
heavy construction equipment brought from Afghanistan was stored and used in the 
Sudan to build twenty-three camps to house and further train Afghan-Arab 
mujahideen.[Y[3} By 1991 Osama bin Laden had abandoned his dealings in Pakistan, 
and his assiduous secretary, Wadih al-Hage, transported his last personal effects to 
Khartoum. 

Table 4. 1 1slamist terrorist organizations 



Couniry 


Dale 


Organization 


leader 


Al'shanisian 


(1999) 


Al Qaeda 


Osama hin Laden 


Alp.Tia 


(1997) 


Armed Islamic Group (GIA) 


various 




(1998) 


Sh]hB lErieade lor Call and 


various 






Com ten 






(2004) 


Dhamai Iloumel Daawa 


various 






Salalia 




Egypt 


(1997) 


a l-c i jm aa I al -Isla miya 


la ha Musa 




(1997) 


al-]ihad (Talaa al-Faieh) 


IV. Ayman al-Zawahiri 


Lebanon 


(1997) 


Hlzbullah 


Imad Mu^hnaya. Ilasan \n 








al-Din, Ali Aiwa 




(2001) 


Usbai Al Ansar 


Al Qaeda alliance 


I'd Ids Lin 


(1993) 


Ilarakai ul-lihadal-Islami 








and Ilarakai 








ul-Mujahcdin merpe 




Kashmir 


(2001) 


Ilarakai ul-Muiahcdin 


Parooq Kehman Khali 1 






(ox-l larakal ul-Ansar) 






(2001) 


I.ashkar-c-Toiha 


Profi I lali/. Mohammed Saeed 


Pukisun 


(1Q07) 


liimnai ul-I J uqra 


Shaykh Ali OUani 




(2000) 


lai s h-c- M uha mmad 


Masood AzJiar 


Palestine 


(1997) 


I IAMAS 


Muusa Ahu Mar/ouk 




(1997) 


I'alcsiine Islamic Jihad 






(1999) 


1'II-Shaqaqi I'aciion 


Ramadan al-Shallah 




(2001) 


Al Aqia Manyrs Brigade 


Maman liarphouti 


I 'hi lip pini;"i 


(1997) 


Abu Sayyarc>roup 


Ahduraiak.lanjalani 


Souiheasi Asia 


(2002) 


lammah Islami>ya 


Abu Bakar Bashir, ltiduan 








Isamuddin 


Uzbekistan 


(2001) 


Mamie Movomeni of 


|uma Namangani 






Uzhokisian 





Sources: Report on FoKi&t Terrorist Organisations, Office of Ihe CoonUnatDr lot Gounler- 
lerrorism, Derwrlmenl ol sidle, Washinglon DC, various >vars; HjBaim of Global ZbmrfiMj 
office of lire CoDrdjnBlur lor Counlerlerrorism, annual reporl, |ou7-2002. 



Although the Sudan was the perfect base from which to infiltrate Islamist terrorists into 
Egypt, as the Egyptians well knew, Zawahiri did not immediately follow Bin Laden 
despite a steady flow of Egyptian Afghan-Arabs arriving in Khartoum. Since Osama bin 
Laden was no longer readily available to supply financial assistance, Zawahiri began his 
extensive fundraising tours in the USA. In 1991, using a false passport in the name of 
Dr. Abdel Muez, he arrived in California where he visited at least three mosques to 
collect money for El J, claiming it was to be used "for Afghan widows, orphans and other 
refugees. " 11 741 From the USA he traveled on to Bosnia on French and Swiss passports 
and lived for a time in Denmark with EIJ leader Talaat Fouad Abdul Qasim before being 
granted asylum in Norway. Later Zawahiri returned to Peshawar where he was joined by 
Abdul Qasim, who once again became director of IIRO. By 1991, however, the 
government of Pakistan had decided to rid the country gradually but firmly of 



troublesome Afghan-Arabs, and Jama'at al-lslamiyya was at the head of the list as its 
members returned clandestinely to Egypt from their safe havens in the Sudan. Since 
most Afghan-Arabs expelled from Pakistan were already wanted fugitives in their 
homelands, many used Iran as a transit point to the Sudan while others came through 
northern Iraq where Kurdish revolutionaries protected them until they could filter into 
other countries in the Arab world. 

Zawahiri was a frequent visitor to Khartoum, but despite the growing hostility of the 
Pakistani government he remained quietly in Peshawar until 1993 when the expulsion of 
Egyptian "undesirables" followed the failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister 
Benazir Bhutto. No longer able to charm IS!, Zawahiri finally moved himself and his 
headquarters to the Sudan where he had considerable influence in the Sudanese 
Islamist movement led by Hasan al-Turabi. Within a year he was reported to have 
arranged "security for a meeting in Sudan between Bin Laden and the leaders of the 
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, and the Iranian qovernment." [175l 



Foot-soldiers 

Khaled Shaykh Muhammad, the son of an expatriate Baluchi who had settled in 
Kuwait, was among the most notorious Islamist foot-soldiers to arrive in Pakistan to 
follow Azzam and Osama bin Laden. Muhammad had joined the Muslim Brotherhood as 
a teenager in Kuwait, and he may have visited Afghanistan as early as December 1982 
on a Pakistani passport. He enrolled in North Carolina A&T College in the USA, from 
which he graduated in 1986. During his studies he led clothing and food drives for 
shipments to the Afghan mujahideen, and six months after graduation arrived in 
Peshawar, his airfare reportedly paid by Osama bin Laden. Here Muhammad remained 
for five years as a member of Bin Laden's circle, working for various charities, and 
reportedly present at the founding of Al Qaeda. In 1993 he would play a major role in 
the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, and thereafter as Al Qaeda's 
"chief of operations" he was personally involved in virtually every major attack by the A 
Qaeda network including the recruitment of operatives to work with his nephew Ramzi 
Yousef in the Philippines, the financing of Operation Bojinka, a plot to destroy a dozen 
airliners over the Pacific Ocean, and the mastermind of the destruction of the World 
Trade Center on 9/11. [1761 Ramzi Yousef himself had also made his way to Peshawar 
in the early 1980s where he stayed for a time at the Bayt al-Ashuhada (House of the 
Martyrs). When Bin Laden and Azzam rented a house in Peshawar, the Bayt al-Ansar 
(the House of the Faithful), he became a loyal follower working like his uncle, Khaled 
Shaykh Muhammad, in various Islamic charities that were assisting the mujahideen over 
the border in Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal Yousef, now a member of Al 
Qaeda, emerged in Southeast Asia where he worked in association with the Indonesian 
terrorist Hambali (aka Riduan Isamuddin) who had also been a mujahid in Afghanistan 
and a known associate of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Muhammad Jamal 
Khalifa, brother-in-law to Osama bin Laden. [1771 

Ahmed Said Khadr (aka Abu al-Kanadi) was born in 1946 in Egypt, where he was 
educated before immigrating to Canada in 1977. He became a Canadian citizen and 
director of Human Concern International (HCI), a Canadian charity whose activities 
seemed so innocuous that by 1997 it had received $325,000 in grants from the 



Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). After the Soviet invasion of 
Afghanistan Khadr traveled to Peshawar in the early 1980s as a volunteer in the jihad 
against the Russians. Here he came in contact with Osama bin Laden, long before the 
Al Qaeda terrorist network was created in 1988. In Peshawar Khadr worked with BIF 
and was later a "key figure in the Canadian al-Qaeda network. "11781 He became a close 
associate of Bin Laden and a senior leader in Al Qaeda. 

From the very beginning of the war in Afghanistan Yemen had become a principal 
source of Afghan-Arab mujahideen, among whom the dominant figure was Shaykh 
Abdul Majeed al-Zindani. During the 1980s he reportedly was responsible for recruiting 
between 5,000 and 7,000 Arab Yemenis for military training in Saudi Arabia and 
"religious teaching under his guidance" in Pakistan. [1791 He himself seldom went to the 
front, serving rather as a spiritual father for the mujahideen from the Yemen and the 
leader of Yemen Islamic Jihad. Shaykh Zindani had known Bin Laden since the 1970s 
and in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and was instrumental in raising money from Saudi 
charities. In 1984 he successfully convinced MWL to establish a Commission on 
Scientific Signs in the Quran and later received funds for jihad from the Al Haramain 
Foundation, where he was chosen to spearhead the "It-is-Truth" internet campaign. In 
Yemen he assumed the leadership of the Islah (Islamic Reform Party), and in 1995 he 
founded the radical Imam University in Sanaa where he taught thousands of students 
radical jihad against the West and its most infamous alumnus, John Walker Lindh. 

Shaykh Muhammad Umar, an Afghan and the youthful leader of a small mosque in 
Karachi, occasionally visited Peshawar where he stayed at MAK. In 1983 Bin Laden 
provided financial support for his mosque and even bought the shaykh a house. A 
decade later Shaykh Umar returned the favor as head of the Taliban movement taking 
control of the government in Afghanistan, by assisting Bin Laden in his search for a 
refuge in Afghanistan. 

Wadih al-Hage (aka Abu al-Sabbur; Norman: Wa'da Norman: Abu Abdullah al-Lubani; 
The Manager) was born in Sidon, Lebanon, on 25 July 1960 and immigrated to the USA 
where he became a citizen and graduated from University of Southwestern Louisiana 
with a degree in urban planning. In 1983 he arrived in Peshawar at the age of 
twenty-three where he was employed in the office of MWL. By this time Shaykh Azzam 
had relinquished most of his duties with MWL to concentrate his efforts on MAK. In 
1984 he returned to the USA, only to travel back to Peshawar in 1986, where he was 
assigned to the MAK field office in Quetta, Pakistan. During these years he became a 
confidant of Osama bin Laden, entrusted to arrange the transportation of the last of Bin 
Laden and the family's belongings from Peshawar to Khartoum in 1990. In 1993 Bin 
Laden made him his personal secretary, and he provided false documents for Al Qaeda 
members and devised plans for an Al Qaeda cell in Nairobi. He was then sent to Nairobi 
in 1996, masquerading as a representative of Africa Help - supposedly a German 
humanitarian charity, but unknown to the German authorities. In Nairobi he also set up 
several bogus companies in Kenya and Tanzania as covers for his activities, including a 
fraudulent mining concern, Tanzanite King, under Aadil Habib (aka Abu Ubaidah 
al-Banshiri), a top military commander in Al Qaeda, who died in a boating accident on 
Lake Victoria in 1996. Later al-Hage would be arrested and tried for his part in the 
bombing of US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, during which he testified that 
Bin Laden "was the financier" for MAK before he was sentenced to life imprisonment. 

Born in 1965 and educated as a money manager in the Sudan, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl 



arrived in Peshawar in the 1980s, where he was befriended by Osama bin Laden and 
was given considerable responsibility in his commercial firms. He was among the first to 
take the bay'a (oath of allegiance) to Al Qaeda in 1989, after which he was sent to the 
Sudan to purchase offices, land, and housing for the brothers who were about to move 
from Afghanistan to Khartoum. During these years he traveled back and forth between 
Pakistan and the Sudan, making arrangements for Bin Laden's business ventures and 
family before finally joining Osama bin Laden permanently in Khartoum in 1991. Fadl, 
who had spent some time in the USA during 1988-1989, was a frequent visitor to the Al 
Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. He described its activities there in just a few words: "We 
bring donations to the office and they send donations from Brooklyn to 
Afghanistan. " [1801 In 1996 Osama bin Laden dismissed Fadl when he could not repay 
the $100,000 he had stolen from one of his construction companies. 

Abu Zubayda (aka Zain al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn; Abu Gazawi) was born in 
Riyadh in 1973 to a wealthy Palestinian family from Gaza. Uninterested in politics until 
he met Osama bin Laden, he became obsessed by Bin Laden's ideal of the Islamic 
Caliphate. After the leadership left Afghanistan in the early 1990s the charismatic Abu 
Zubayda remained behind, training volunteers and screening potential jihadists in the 
Bayt al-Ashuhada compound in Peshawar. He personally interviewed every recruit and 
either accepted or rejected him, handled much of the camp's logistics, and controlled its 
finances. He was one of the few Afghan-Arabs who mastered all of the military skills 
taught in the Al Qaeda camps, from explosives to armor-piercing cartridges to 
booby-traps. Once volunteers were finished with the battle of the warlords raging in 
Afghanistan they would return to Pakistan where Abu Zubayda would send them to cells 
around the world. He was the instructor of Jamal Beghal, the ringleader of an Al Qaeda 
European network in France and Belgium. He was responsible for planning 
unsuccessful bomb plots in Jordan, Canada, and the USA during the millennium 
celebrations, for which he was sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court and 
later captured in 2002 by the CIA. 

Mohammad Nazzal, a West Bank Palestinian, was another important Afghan-Arab. He 
earned a degree from the University of Karachi in computer science before becoming a 
mujahid in Afghanistan. When the Soviets withdrew, he returned to the West Bank and 
joined the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as HAMAS, and became a member of 
its Political Bureau in 1992. With the support of HAMAS, he founded the 
Jaish-e-Muhammad (Muhammad's Army) in 1991 to launch a campaign of terrorist 
attacks to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. After a series of bombings in 
Amman the Jordanian authorities retaliated in August 1999 by arresting twelve HAMAS 
activists, closing the Amman bureau of Felastine a\-Muslemah, a HAMAS-affiliated 
magazine, and issuing a warrant for the arrest of Mohammad Nazzal, who managed to 
evade the police and remain at large. 

Other mujahideen leaders, including Mahmoud Abouhalima, an Egyptian Afghan-Arab, 
and his accomplice, the Afghan-Arab Ahmad Ajaj, entered the USA on fake Pakistani 
passports carrying bomb-making manuals and other material for the Trade Towers 
bombers. A third accomplice, Sudanese Siddiq Ibrahim Siddiq Ali, had been with 
Abouhalima in Afghanistan in 1988-1990. All were thought to have used the Al Kifah 
Refugee Center in Brooklyn as a safe haven, including Ali Mohammed who was a staff 
sergeant in the Special Forces of the US Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. On the 
weekends Ali would travel to New York to distribute Islamist pamphlets and give 
instruction in weapons and explosives at the Al Kifah Center and to fledgling Egyptian 



jihadists who were forming their own terrorist group at the Al Farouq Mosque. It was the 
Center that provided AN Mohammed with an introduction to Osama bin Laden during his 
trips to Peshawar. [181l When Ali left the army in November 1989 he moved to California 
where he accompanied Ayman al-Zawahiri on his fundraising trip, on which he traveled 
as Dr. Abdel Muez, representing the Red Crescent Society. 



Wael Hamza Julaidan and the Rabita Trust 

Wael Jamza Julaidan was born into a wealthy Medina family in 1958, and like many 
others he was appalled by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. With assistance from 
MWL he shortly arrived in Pakistan, and by the mid-1980s he was the director of 
SARCS in Peshawar. [182l He was personally close to Shaykh Abdullah Azzam who 
undoubtedly introduced him to Osama bin Laden in Peshawar. They became close 
friends, and using the alias Abu Hasan al-Madani he was one of the original founders of 
Al Qaeda at the meeting held in Peshawar 18-20 August 1988. Upon his return from 
Pakistan in 1989 Julaidan cultivated his reputation as a cultured businessman 
representing MWL. He was often given the innocuous title of "fundraiser," and fundraise 
he did. Julaidan was later one of the principal members of the Saudi Joint Relief 
Committee for Kosovo and Chechnya (SJRC) and maintained close personal 
connections with the Al Haramain Foundation. His name was on the list of the Golden 
Chain as an intermediary with Saudi plutocrats Suleiman al-Rashid of Riyadh, and 
Abdel Qader Bakri, Salah al-Din Abdel Jawad, and Abdel Hadi Taher from Jidda. [1831 

He was well known for his Salafist views, however, and his friendship with Osama bin 
Laden was largely regarded with indifference by the Saudi authorities until they 
declared Bin Laden persona non grata and consigned him to permanent exile in 1993. 
Nevertheless, Julaidan continued the friendship, which did not seem to jeopardize his 
rise in the bureaucracy of MWL. When the USA and UN indicted Julaidan for 
supporting terrorism on 6 September 2002, the US Treasury and the government of 
Saudi Arabia froze his assets and those of the Rabita Trust, of which he had been 
Director-General since 2000. When he was put on the US list of SDGT for funding Al 
Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, however, most Saudi Arabians were shocked. 
The Saudi Interior Minister and head of Saudi intelligence services, Prince Nawaf bin 
Abd al-Aziz, expressed his "surprise" and hoped the report was "untrue because it 
would be unfortunate if a Saudi businessman was assisting and funding terrorism. " H 841 
Prince Nawaf argued that Julaidan, who had worked for MWL for more than a decade, 
was innocent, but his defense of Julaidan was not sufficient to prevent the Saudi 
representative to the UN, Prince Naif bin Abd al-Aziz, from placing before the Security 
Council a letter requesting that "Julaidan be added to the Committee's consolidated 
[terrorism] list." Julaidan, however, remained a free man, and the Rabita Trust was 
relocated in Pakistan under the name of the Aid Organization of the Ulama. 

The Rabita Trust for the Rehabilitation of Stranded Pakistanis, known simply as the 
Rabita Trust, had been founded in July 1988 by Dr. Abdullah Omar Naseef, 
Secretary-General of MWL during the administration of Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq 
and funded by MWL. Although the Trust was ostensibly "a popular, international, Islamic 
and non-governmental organization at which Muslims from all over the world are 
represented," it was, in fact, one of the financial arms of the Pakistani MWL, in which 
Saudi money gave them de facto control of the organization. [1851 Its original purpose 



was to assist 260,000 Biharis stranded in Bangladesh to return to Pakistan, but it was 
soon providing funds for Kashmir terrorists. Although President Musharraf of Pakistan 
was a patron of the Rabita Trust, it is unclear whether he was aware of its funding 
terrorism, but it was well known that the Al Akhtar Trust, a Rabita Trust subsidiary 
founded in Pakistan in 2000, was openly Islamist and providing financial support for two 
Pakistan terrorist organizations, Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Muhammad. The 
government eventually froze the Al Akhtar bank accounts, but even that did not deter its 
members from continuing a close relationship with the Al Rashid Trust of Karachi. [1861 



Pakistan and the Al Rashid Trust 

In the secular Pakistan of 1957 there were only 150 religious schools (deeni madrasa): 
when the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989 there were more than 3,000 deeni madrasas 
with over 100,000 students. This phenomenal growth in religious education continued 
throughout the 1990s as the government of Pakistan disbursed "millions of rupees" to 
religious schools "as government donations from zakat money." Also huge sums of 
money from Saudi Arabia, which hitherto had helped finance the mujahideen, were now 
transposed to support Salafist groups in Pakistan, the deeni madrasas, and the Banuri 
Deobandi madrasa complex in Karachi. f1 871 Founded in 1947 by Maulana Yusuf 
Banuri, the school was located on twelve sites and annually enrolled some 3,000 
students. Banuri was home to the former mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, author of more 
than 2,000 fabvas, including a declaration of war against the USA after its invasion of 
Afghanistan in 2001. It was also at Banuri that Osama bin Laden met Mullah Omar, the 
Afghan religious leader who would one day rule Afghanistan as head of the Taliban 
organization. Its most famous jihadist, however, was Maulana Masood Azhar who taught 
at Banuri for two years before leaving in 1989. Maulana Masood was the organizational 
genius behind the amalgamation of Pakistani Islamist movements into the umbrella 
Harkatul Ansar and would later take personal charge of Pakistan's Jaish-e-Muhammad. 
The Jaish was later designated a terrorist organization by the USA in October 2001 , 
followed by the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on 24 April 2002. 

As a close personal friend of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership, Maulana 
Masood was active with Al Qaeda forces in Somalia in 1993 and was reported to have 
clandestinely met with Bin Laden in Medina the following year. Consequently, when Bin 
Laden returned to Afghanistan from the Sudan in June 1996, Masood helped him 
establish the Al Rashid Trust as a charitable organization with the approval of ISI and 
the government of Pakistan as a charity in compliance with the Income Tax Act. 
Maulana Mufti Rasheed Ahmad (1928-2002), co-founder with Maulana Yusuf Banuri of 
the Banuri Deobandi madrasa, became its Director and Mufti Abu Lubaba its ideologue; 
these were the only two having direct access to Osama bin Laden. The Al Rashid Trust 
soon had forty branches, and by 2000 was the second-largest charity in Pakistan. The 
Trust was not only "one of Osama's many sources of income," but it had close ties to 
the Taliban in Afghanistan and jihadists fighting in Kashmir. It had funded Qari Saifullah 
Akhtar, a graduate of Banuri madrasa, who became leader of the Islamist Harakat 
ul-Jihad al-lslami (HUJI) forces and "one of a number of madrasa-trained Pakistanis 
who helped the Taliban seize power in Afghanistan in 1996." After the Taliban 
established their government in Afghanistan Akhtar served as adviser to its leader, 



Mullah Shaykh Muhammad Omar. His mujahideen, "the Punjabi," would fight for both 
the Taliban and Al Qaeda from their bases in Kandahar, Kabul, and Khost and were the 
spearhead of the mujahideen invasion of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Chechnya. [1881 
The threat to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan was substantially reduced following 9/1 1 and the 
presence of US forces in Central Asia. Akhtar was arrested in Dubai in 2004 and 
extradited to Pakistan. 

Before being banned by the Pakistan government after 9/11 the A Rashid Trust, 
during its short life, had provided financial and legal assistance to Islamists in jail, 
established a network of madrasas and mosques in Afghanistan, and coordinated its 
activity with the Wafa Khairia, an Afghan charity "largely funded by bin Laden. " [1891 Its 
trucks regularly hauled weapons, ammunition, and supplies from Pakistan to the Taliban 
forces in Afghanistan, and when the Taliban destroyed the ancient statues of the 
Buddha of Bamiyan, "parts were handed over to the Rashid Trust so they could sell 
them to art smugglers and use the proceeds for operations." [190l The Indian 
government was quite convinced that Al Rashid may have collected funds for the poor 
and needy, but in reality it was primarily a front organization for the Taliban with close 
ties to three Pakistan terrorist organizations, the Dharb-i-Mumin, Lashkar-e-Toiba, and 
Jaish-e-Muhammad. Many of its mujahideen had been trained in Al Qaeda camps. 
When the Al Rashid Trust became one of the first charities recognized for funding 
terrorist organizations after 9/11, it resisted any investigations and discreetly changed 
its name to the Aid Organization of the Ulama and remained active in Pakistan. 

During the Afghan war Pakistan had at first welcomed a plethora of Muslim charities. 
Once the war ended, however, the government had second thoughts and in 1993 began 
to close those known to be fronts for Islamist mujahideen. In 1993 attempts in Egypt to 
assassinate the Interior Minister, Hassan al-AIfy, in August and the Prime Minister, Atef 
Sedki, in November were blamed on Egyptian Afghan-Arabs from Pakistan and the 
Sudan, and under Egyptian pressure Pakistan signed a treaty of extradition promising 
"to return" 1,800 Egyptian Afghan-Arabs. This effectively ended the Al Qaeda cell in 
Pakistan. Its members fled to Afghanistan, scattered around the world, or simply 
disappeared underground. The Islamists strongly protested the closures of the charities 
and threatened violent demonstrations. Important military officers, including Lieutenant 
General Javed Nasir, who had led ISI during the Afghan war, urged the government to 
cease and desist, which it did. When the UN requested information from the government 
of Pakistan about the Al Rashid Trust, its officials declared that "it has proven 
particularly difficult to pierce the charity veil and uncover the deep pocket donors, 
including business entities that provide such funding. " [1911 After the Al Rashid Trust 
was prorogued it soon reemerged outside Pakistan as the Al Akhtar Trust International. 
However, that organization was listed by the US Treasury Department in October 2003 
after it was learned that a member of its board of directors was implicated in the 
kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal newsman Daniel Pearl. 

Under great pressure from the USA a symbolic 100 aid workers were expelled, but it 
was not until the government was faced with growing internal violence and President 
Pervez Musharraf narrowly escaped several attempts to assassinate him that the 
Pakistan National Economic Council announced in January 2004 a $100 million 
program to administer the religious school curriculum and reform some 8,000 
madrasas. This was denounced by the clerics as appeasing the USA who "were 
concerned that private Islamic charities finance the madrasas, where . . . radical 



Wahhabi theology is taught promoting militancy and jihadi sentiment among Muslim 
youth." The Pakistan media were skeptical that government intervention would result in 
any substantive changes, for throughout history Islamic charitable institutions had 
"always remained free from government intervention and have functioned 
independently. " [1921 



Chapter 5 Islamic charities and the revolutionary Sudan 



Foreigners are now required to register with the police within three days of arrival, 
and a permit should be obtained for movement from one region to another. 

Sudan Minister of Interior, April 1995 



When Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cabal had settled into the Sudan in 1991, 
the Islamist revolution was only a year old. The Sudan was the second government after 
Iran to adopt Islamist principles for its constitution, but unlike Iran it did not possess 
ethnic homogeneity or a single common language, and a third of its inhabitants are 
non-Muslims. Iran fought a fierce war with its neighbor Iraq for eight years 
(1980-1988), but until 2005 the Sudan had been mired in an even more debilitating and 
tragic civil war in the south and now in the west, in Darfur, that the NIF regime in 
Khartoum had not been willing to end if the price to be paid would compromise its 
Islamist ideology. 

The Sudan is the largest country in Africa, a million square miles, the size of the USA 
east of the Mississippi, straddling "the Afro-Arab divide between northern and central 
Africa" on the frontier of Islam. In 1991 some 25 million Sudanese were represented by 
nineteen major ethnic groups and hundreds of smaller ones speaking some four 
hundred languages. Arabic is the lingua franca in the urban enclaves, but English is 
often the preferred language of the elite. Unfortunately, it was only too true that "religion 
in the Sudanese political context [was] no longer a matter of personal ethics, piety, 
spirituality or morality; but a lethal weapon in the power struggle" between Arab North 
and African South. [1931 It was that power struggle, and the first emerging Arab Islamist 
state, that attracted Osama bin Laden to the Sudan. There was, in addition, the long 
tradition of private and government support for Islamist movements, a tradition continued 
by Sudan's Islamist leader and champion of Bin Laden, Hasan al-Turabi. Although 
Khartoum was generally regarded as an African and Arab backwater, its very lack of 
visibility appealed to the Islamists as a safe haven for the headquarters of those Islamic 
charities over which they had administrative control. Moreover, the presence of Islamic 
banks in the capital would prove useful for the quiet laundering of charitable funds for 
uncharitable causes. 




Map 2 The Khartoum-AI Qaeda nexus 



Banking in the Sudan 

Perched marginally on the frontier of Islam, the Sudan had received little assistance 
from the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) with its headquarters in Kuwait, and banking 
in the Sudan did not receive any significant financial stimulus until 1975 when the Arab 



Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) established its headquarters in 
Khartoum. BADEA hoped to exploit the vast areas of Kordofan being opened to Arab 
investors for large-scale mechanized farming designed to make the Sudan the "Bread 
Basket of the Middle East." By 1977 BADEA, which received broad support from 
members of the Arab League, was the principal lending institution in the Sudan. It 
further consolidated its position in banking circles by absorbing the Saudi-sponsored 
Special Arab Aid Fund for Africa. The commendable purpose of BADEA was the 
promotion of "Arab-African friendship and solidarity" by providing funds for economic 
development in Africa. [1941 It was very active in the countries of the Sahil and savanna 
of the medieval Bilad al-Sudan, the great African plain that stretched from Port Sudan 
on the Red Sea to Dakar on the Atlantic, and where Saudi money went Islam would 
follow. Its financial assistance was employed to support Arab governments, as well as Idi 
Amin in Uganda and African Muslim leaders, particularly in West Africa - Sekou Toure 
in Guinea and Ahmadou Adhijo in Cameroon. [1951 

The Sudan was not only the home for Middle Eastern economic development banks, 
but its government publicly encouraged private banks to open in Khartoum. It offered 
generous terms to the Nilein Industrial Bank in 1961, the Unity Bank in 1970, the 
National Bank of Abu Dhabi in 1976, and later the Saudi-Sudanese bank, founded by 
the Saudi banker Khaled bin Mahfouz in 1984. During these years the Sudan also 
became the center for one of the first attempts in the Muslim world to introduce banking 
based on Islamic principles. The Faisal Islamic Bank (Sudan) was founded in 1977 and 
opened the following year in Khartoum. [1961 Next, the Tadamon Islamic Bank of Sudan 
was established in November 1981 and commenced operations in 1983 under its 
Chairman, Dr. Hassan Osman Abdalla; and finally the enigmatic Al Shamal Islamic 
Bank, created in 1988, opened for business in 1990. By 1985 the rapidly expanding 
Islamic Banking System International of Luxembourg, which was 25 percent owned by 
the Al Baraka Group, operated a branch in Khartoum, and listed the Kuwait Finance 
Group, the Ministries of Awqaf of Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, and the Tadamon Bank of 
Sudan as shareholders. Other Sudanese Islamic banks were less successful: the 
Islamic Solidarity Bank and the Islamic Company for Investment, both founded in 1983, 
failed to attract investors. 

Of all such banks, the Faisal Islamic Bank held a special and privileged position in 
Khartoum. It had been founded by Saudi Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud, and after 
passage in the national assembly of the Faisal Islamic Bank Act of the Sudan in 1977, it 
had served as principal patron of the Sudanese Muslim Brothers. The Sudanese Ikhwan 
and the political coterie surrounding the Islamist politician and ideologue Hasan 
al-Turabi played a prominent role in the enactment of that Bank Act, and both had 
representatives on the board of directors. Moreover, the Faisal Islamic Bank, which 
enjoyed the patronage of the Saudi royal family, which controlled 40 percent of its 
shares, also enjoyed the protection of Sudanese President and dictator Ja'far 
al-Numayri. Whether for political or personal reasons al-Numayri had become 
committed to applying Islamic doctrine to all aspects of Sudanese life. He therefore 
bestowed on the Faisal Islamic Bank privileges denied other commercial banks, 
including exemption from taxes on assets, profits, wages, and pensions. He also 
guaranteed that the bank would not be subject to either confiscation or nationalization. 

From the 1990s the Islamic banks played an important role in the political life of the 
Sudan, and particularly the Islamist-dominated NIF. Founded in 1986 after the overthrow 
of Ja'far al-Numayri in 1985, NIF was an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood but 



sought a broader base for the popular mobilization of a political agenda of the 
Islamization of Sudanese society. It received substantial funding from the Islamic banks 
- Faisal, Tadamon, Dar al-Mal al-lslami Investment Corporation, and the Kuwaiti Zakat 
Fund - and through its members it gained control of the currency exchange market. 
Well before the Islamist coup d'etat of 30 June 1989 NIF, with funds from the Islamic 
banks, had laid the foundations for the "internationalization of lslamism." [197] The 
Muslim political opponents of NIF, the Ansar and the Khatmiyya religious brotherhoods 
and their political parties, the Umma and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), found 
themselves checkmated when they tried but failed to introduce their own Islamic banking 
systems. Thus the appeal of the Islamic banks prior to June 1989, as well as 
government support and patronage thereafter, enabled the institutions to acquire an 
estimated 20 percent of Sudanese deposits by 1992. In June 1991, at the time when 
Osama bin Laden was transferring his operations to Sudan, the Faisal Islamic Bank had 
twenty-six and the Tadamon Islamic Bank eighteen branches operating in the Sudan, 
and most commercial banks allowed depositors to conduct their financial transactions 
on Islamic principles. 11 981 

After the 30 June Revolution the public and private Islamic Sudanese banks were 
expected to support the Islamist revolution and the Islamist development of the Sudan, 
particularly after the Sudanese economy was hopelessly mismanaged by military 
officers who were illiterate in economic affairs. In March 1991 a presidential decree 
(No. 239) introduced by fiat an "Islamic Shariah Support Fund" to insure the 
implementation of Shar'ia by deepening Islamic faith and practices, spreading and 
encouraging holy war (jihad) to protect the Islamic community. Specifically, the Fund 
was used for the mobilization and training of a people's defense force, a paramilitary 
organization, "and providing for martyrs' families." The martyrs were, of course, the 
jihadists who had lost their lives fighting a losing war against the Sudan People's 
Liberation Army (SPLA) in the southern Sudan. The government of Sudan contributed a 
small donation of £Sd100,000, and ministers gave a month's salary, but the commercial 
banks were expected to contribute, and indeed generally did. Abdel Rahim Hamdi, a 
Muslim Brother, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, and member of the board 
of directors of the Faisal Bank, donated £Sd20,000, and his bank added more than 
£Sd7 million followed by another £Sd5 million from the Tadamon Bank. Even the 
innocuous Al Shamal Islamic Bank chipped in £Sd7 million. Although these amounts 
appear to be generous donations, the drastic depreciation of the Sudanese pound in the 
early 1990s reduced these impressive gifts to a pittance when converted to US dollars. 
Nevertheless, the banks contributed more for the jihad than the government or any 
company or individual. 11991 In March 1997 the Secretary of the Sudanese Information 
Ministry, Muhammad al-Bashir Muhammad al-Hady, boasted that the government "had 
completely Islamized the financial sector."[200] 



Enter Osama bin Laden 

Even before the arrival of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda had already investigated and 
found the Sudan a most suitable location from which to continue its jihad. After all, the 
government of the Sudan was the only one carrying out a jihad to create an Islamic 
republic south of the Sahara, and needed all the help it could get. Shortly after Bin 
Laden appeared in Khartoum, Yunnis Khalis of Hezb-i-lslami, operating from Al Qaeda's 



Al Jabal camp, issued "An Appeal to Support the Holy War in Sudan. " [201] Even before 
his arrival in Khartoum Bin Laden established relations with a bank upon which he could 
depend to carry out his wishes. He invested $50 million in the moribund Al Shamal 
Islamic Bank, which then had only two branches in Khartoum. [2021 In addition, he 
opened an account in his own name in the Central Bank of Khartoum, and although 
never verified, it was implied that the account included his own money and funds 
deposited by many Islamic charitable organizations, "especially from the Gulf." [2031 
Undoubtedly, the Al Shamal bank was now largely capitalized by Bin Laden and Saleh 
Abdallah Kamel, a wealthy financial and media personality in the Arab world. Kamel was 
the chairman of the Dallah Al Baraka Group: ironically, its Al Baraka Bank, established 
in the Sudan in 1984, was privately held and operated as a traditional western bank. 
Moreover, the Al Shamal board of directors appears to have included wealthy members 
of NIF, Saudi Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, and a member of the Bin Laden family. 

There is little doubt that Bin Laden wanted his "personal" bank in the Sudan, given the 
recent problems his family had encountered with their personal investments in the 
Banque Al Saoudi. That bank had only been saved from bankruptcy in 1989 by the 
Banque de France and then assimilated by the Banque Indosuez, and its name 
changed to the Banque Frangaise pour I'Orient. "Generally speaking," the same set of 
shareholders, "Salem bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, Salam Ahmed Bogshan, Saad 
Khalil Al Bahjat, Taha Baksh, etc." had invested in the Banque Al Saoudi and the Saudi 
Arab Finance Corporation in Paris, the Saudi Finance Corporation (SAUDIFIN) in 
Geneva, and the Saudi Arab Finance Corporation International in Luxembourg. Osama 
bin Laden was certainly no novice when it came to moving money and no stranger to 
the Saudi banking families. [2041 Although he undoubtedly had a controlling interest in 
the Al Shamal bank, Bin Laden was careful to make it difficult if not impossible to block 
all his funds by maintaining smaller accounts in the Tadamon and Faisal banks and in 
the little-known Bank of Almusia. He also controlled bank accounts in London, Malaysia, 
and Hong Kong, from which he routed funds through an account listed under another 
name at Giro Credit in Vienna. For reasons of both privacy and secrecy, however, the 
Al Shamal Islamic Bank remained his bank of choice. 

Despite its relative insignificance - or perhaps because of it - the Al Shamal bank was 
used to transfer large sums of money During the trials in the USA of Al Qaeda 
members accused of participating in the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya 
and Tanzania in 1998 an Al Qaeda collaborator, Essam al-Ridi, testified that Bin Laden 
had used the Al Shamal bank to transfer $230,000 from the Sudan to a bank in Arizona 
in order to purchase a plane to fly Stinger missiles from Pakistan to the Sudan. In 
another case, Bin Laden worked with the Abu Ali Group, an Al Qaeda affiliate operating 
in Jordan, to transfer $100,000 from the Al Shamal bank to an account in Amman by a 
courier traveling on a Sudanese passport under a false name. By 1993 Al Qaeda 
regularly used the Al Shamal, Tadamon, and Faisal banks to create an intricate 
business and financial network based on Islamic practices with funds from "dozens of 
'charities'" that raised "money for jihad from the rich and faithful around the Gulf. "[205] 
Despite his many investments in the Sudan and the cost of road building and 
maintaining a 600-man payroll, Bin Laden was still able to create a financial network in 
the Balkans in 1993 using charities "that provided comprehensive social and welfare 
services. Not only did these charities raise money, they were also effective in building 
popular support for militant Islam. " [2061 



Islamic charities and the Sudan 



The earliest Islamic charitable outreach to make any significant impact in Africa began 
in 1962 with the founding of MWL in Saudi Arabia. The League was a creation of the 
Saudi royal family, designed to coordinate and spread Islam throughout the world. For 
years it remained as the supreme authority in the Islamic world on various theological 
issues, reviewed the progress and problems of Islam, and reported on events in a 
monthly magazine that received wide distribution. Two decades later MWL was funding 
training centers for Islamic leaders in Mauritania, Nigeria, Indonesia, France, and the 
USA, and seminaries in Mecca and Brussels that sent graduates to Africa [207] The 
Sudan was fertile ground for MWL because its Muslim north and African south had 
historically been divided between Islam and the traditional African religions and 
Christianity since the nineteenth century. Here on the frontiers of Islam was the 
opportunity for Islam to advance into the heart of Africa. The thin veneer of secular 
toleration introduced by the British was slowly being stripped away after independence 
- internally by Islamists such as Hasan al-Turabi and externally by Muslim Brothers 
fleeing the secular Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser. By 1984 MWL had provided over two 
million copies of the Quran for the conversion of non-Muslim Sudanese. [2081 

The Islamic Call Organization (Munazzamat al-Da'wa al-lslamiyya, aka Islamic Call, 
Islamic Da'wa), is a more modern but equally powerful outreach institution in Africa: 
da\va is commonly used to describe Islamic missionary efforts, e.g. the Grand Imam of 
the Al Azhar mosque in Cairo is customarily named the "Chairman of World Islamic 
Council for Da'wa and Relief." Islamic Call itself was founded in May 1973 by Muammar 
Qaddafi of Libya, who was determined to spread the message of Islam throughout 
sub-Saharan Africa. In 1980 the organization suddenly moved its headquarters to 
Khartoum, and the reasons for leaving Libya have never been disclosed. Although the 
erratic Qaddafi had created numerous problems with his fellow Arab states, he also had 
his own home-grown dissidents, Libyan Islamist revolutionaries. [2091 After moving to the 
Sudan in 1980, Islamic Call proclaimed itself a "non political organization." Its Executive 
Director was a Sudanese Islamist, Abd al-Salaam Sulayman Saad, who led a 
sixty-member board of trustees representing the governments of Saudi Arabia and the 
Gulf states. One of its members admitted, "Since its inception Munazzamat al-Dawaa 
worked hard on maintaining Islamic Identity and protecting [the] existence of Islam in 
Africa in particular and also in Eastern Europe and Asia with a view to fighting dangers 
of colonization and Christian missionary activities which exploit conditions of poverty 
and ill health which prevail in a number of Muslim communities. "[21 01 Not surprisingly, 
after Islamic Call moved to the Sudan it initiated a determined proselytizing effort, 
especially in the southern Sudan among those practicing indigenous religions and 
Christianity. The southerners regarded it with ill-disguised hostility. It was seen as an 
unwanted intrusion that was determined to organize, finance, and direct Islam-oriented 
projects - particularly those concerned with what Islamic Call named the Islamic 
Civilization Project for Africa. [21 11 

Shortly after the relocation of the Islamic Call Organization, a satellite, the Islamic 
African Relief Agency (IARA), was founded in Khartoum. Its initial purpose was to 
provide assistance to Africans threatened by flood and drought in the southern Sudan 
and Uganda. These praiseworthy humanitarian efforts, however, were soon of less 



importance than assisting the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Ethiopian and Eritrean 
refugees in the Sudan. [2121 By 1985 Islamic Call and IARA were implementing a 
strategy to penetrate all of Africa. The continent was divided into six regions, and plans 
were devised to establish communications and information centers in as many African 
states as possible. [2131 Serving as an "outreach" organization of MWL, IARA had the 
use of its offices in some forty Muslim countries and field missions in a score of African 
states. Its progress, like other Islamic charities in the developing world, would be 
facilitated in large part from the substantial funds provided by the governments of the 
Arabian Peninsula. [2141 

By 1990 IARA served as the perfect cover through which Sudanese intelligence 
agencies could provide assistance to Muslim revolutionary movements in the Horn of 
Africa. It would eventually serve as an umbrella organization coordinating efforts by the 
many Islamic charities working with mujahideen in the Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and 
the Middle East. At the time when offices of IARA began to spread throughout Africa, 
yet another charity, the Islamic Relief Agency (IRSA), sprouted from the fertile riverine 
soil of the northern Sudan. Its principal mission was to act as a counterpoise to the 
many Christian and western charities operating in the famine-stricken Sudan from 1984 
after the devastating floods in Khartoum, but it did not establish a permanent office in 
the country until 1991. Nevertheless, IRSA collected funds for Islamic charities in the 
Sudan, but it was even better known for its close relationship with the Afghan-Arabs 
fighting in Afghanistan. In the mid-1980s it joined with other Islamic relief agencies to 
form the Peshawar Islamic Coordinating Council (ICC), chaired by Shaykh Azzam. 
Nearly two decades later, when Pakistan deported eighty-nine Arab aid workers in 
October 2001, four Sudanese working at the "Sudan-based Islamic Relief Agency 
[IRSA]" were among those sent back to the Sudan. [2151 

The Sudan also became a safe haven for the education and training of Islamist 
jihadists as well as Islamic scholars. With financial support from the Gulf states the 
Sudan provided hundreds of scholarships to the Islamic African Center (IAC) located a 
few miles south of Khartoum, to which Saudi Arabia also made substantial 
contributions. [216l Working with both Islamic Call and IARA the IAC by 1983 had 
become the third partner in what would prove to be a determined Islamist outreach. [21 71 
After the 30 June Revolution the Center evolved into the African International University 
(AIU), and Colonel Faisal Ali Abu Salih, the government's first Minister of Interior, 
compatriot of President Bashir, a committed Islamist and former IAC student, served as 
an AIU sponsor. A visitor to AIU, who was jailed for his curiosity, labeled it "the school 
of choice among radical Muslims looking for a career in terrorism. " [21 81 Undoubtedly, 
AIU was a training ground for religious teachers, but by 1992 it was renowned for the 
number of East and West African Islamists who had graduated from the university. In 
2004 one IAC graduate, an Al Qaeda terrorist from the Comoro Islands, carried a $1 
million price tag on his head. 



Revolutionary Sudan 

In the aftermath of the 30 June Revolution the Islamist military leadership in the Sudan 
sought to reduce the influence and activities of western relief agencies operating in the 
country, and to make certain that those Islamic charities in the Sudan were properly 
Islamist. Despite their claims to the contrary, within a year IRSA, IARA, Islamic Call, 



and later the Muwafaq (Benevolence) Foundation strongly supported the revolutionary 
government and used their resources to assist Sudanese Islamists creating the Islamic 
Republic of the Sudan The leader of the new Islamist regime, General Omar Hassan 
al-Bashir, was a close friend of General Abd al-Rahman Muhammad Siwar al-Dahab, 
the former Chief of State and director of the Transitional Military Council (TMC), who 
had led the coup in 1985 that ended the dictatorship of his former boss, General and 
President Ja'far al-Numayri General Siwar was a well-known Muslim Brother, and after 
TMC was replaced the following year by the elected government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, he 
was appointed Chairman of the Board of Islamic Call. Under his leadership Islamic Call 
became ever more conservative. After the June Revolution it would "organize, finance 
and direct, various Islamic oriented projects, especially those concerned with the 
Islamic Civilization Project" undertaken by NIF activists to impose on all Sudanese - 
Muslims, Christians, and Traditionalists alike - Islamic institutions and Arab-Islamic 
traditions, speech, customs, and religion. They were dedicated to transform the Sudan 
"into an Arab-Islamic civilized Nation-state by the year 2000. " [2191 By 1990 all Islamic 
charities and NGOs operating in the Sudan had been registered by the Ministry of 
Social Welfare, and their directors were interrogated by the various intelligence 
agencies of the Islamist, military, revolutionary government - except for IRSA, whose 
members included the well-known Islamist Hasan al-Turabi. 

Of all the relief agencies in the Sudan the Sudanese Red Crescent, which was 
considered the most secular and even-handed, was abruptly dissolved by presidential 
decree shortly after the National Salvation Revolutionary Command Council (NSRCC, or 
simply RCC) seized power in June 1989. It would be reformed under government 
auspices a year later with an Islamist board of directors, and continued to work with UN 
organizations as in the past but avoided any cooperation with western aid agencies. 
Moreover, the new Islamist government soon attracted the attention of other Islamic 
charities, which swiftly established themselves in the favorable religious and political 
environment surrounding Khartoum. The Islamic Benevolence Committee (IBC), 
founded in Peshawar by Adil Galil Abdul Batargy, had provided assistance to both 
Afghan refugees and the Afghan-Arab mujahideen. The Muwafaq Foundation was new 
and largely unknown, but it had the firm support of the powerful Khaled bin Mahfouz. 
Islamic Call expanded its outreach; IRSA was very active, led by its Chairman of the 
Board of Trustees, Dr. al-Juzuli Dafalla, the conservative former Prime Minister of the 
TMC government, and its equally conservative Director General, Dr. Said Abdallah. Like 
IARA and Islamic Call, IRSA administration had been stocked with Islamists well before 
the 30 June Revolution, and by 1993 its former members were well placed in the 
Ministry of Health and the somewhat dubious Peace and Development Foundation. All 
three charities were also actively proselytizing in prisons, implementing the Shari'a 
Implementation Support Fund, and administering "peace villages" where displaced 
Sudanese from the Nuba Mountains were forced into concentration camps. 

Under the Minister of Social Planning and powerful leader in NIF, Ali Osman Taha, all 
government institutions were expected to carry out a Comprehensive Da'wa Program to 
renew and revitalize the "spiritual life" of the Sudanese by a "framework of 
comprehensive social harmony." Armed forces and police officers were also trained 
and received diplomas for studies in da'wa. [220] In addition, a People's Police Force 
(PPF), a constabulary, was created to serve as guardians of public morals. Until his 
death in a helicopter crash in 1993 Sharaf al-Din Ali Mukhtar, the brother of RCC 
member Brigadier Kamal Ali Mukhtar and former Director of IRSA in Jidda before being 



expelled from Saudi Arabia in April 1991 for seditious activity, served as an intelligence 
agent attached to General Headquarters in Khartoum, whose mission was to watch and 
report on the activities of western relief agencies in the Sudan. 



People's Defense Force 

When the SPLA had, in several fierce battles, defeated the regular army in 1984, 
Siwar al-Dahab, then chief of staff to Numayri, was the first to arm the wild murahileen 
in southern Kordofan with automatic weapons to stem the advance of the SPLA. At the 
insistence of the Minister of State for Defense, Fadlallah Burma Nasr, a Baqqara from 
Lagowa, Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi continued the practice in order to strengthen his 
position in negotiations with SPLA. The result was massive devastation and the 
methodical slaughter of the non-Muslim Dinka and Nuer, particularly the young men, in 
the northern Bahr al-Ghazal and western Upper Nile. The success of the murahileen 
confirmed the belief within the RCC, which had seized power on 30 June 1989, that it 
must create a more organized militia, the People's Defense Force (Difa' al-Sha'bi, 
PDF), to defend the state and spread the faith when it could no longer rely on the army 
to defeat the southern Sudanese insurgents. 

The paramilitary PDF was designed to protect the 30 June Revolution from armed 
opposition in the North and to suppress the non-Muslim rebellion in the South. As the 
ideological guide of NIF, Hasan al-Turabi continued his efforts to instill Islamist ideology 
in the new members of PDF. He had long argued in private and public that it would be 
impossible to "Islamize" the Sudanese army because its professional officers had 
already been "secularized." Thus, in order to achieve "consensus," an Islamic Sudan 
should create "a small standing army and a large popular defense force" that would 
come from an "Islamized" society. [2211 Many of the senior officers of the army were 
arrested or purged, and those unit commanders who remained in the army deeply 
resented the creation of a rival, but they could hardly object. During the early months of 
1989 before the Bashir coup d'etat that army had fallen further into disgrace by another 
series of defeats by the SPLA as demoralizing as those suffered in 1984. In response 
the Bashir government renamed its militias the People's Defense Force in November, 
only four months after coming to power in Khartoum. It then announced that all first-year 
students enrolled in Sudanese universities had to undergo PDF training. The 
shaven-headed, slogan-spouting students were not particularly enthusiastic to engage in 
combat, but their appearance managed to send a chill through the inhabitants of 
Khartoum. [2221 Many parents used their influence and their cash to seek deferments 
for their sons. The Council of Ministers, which succeeded the RCC, responded by 
announcing in March 1991 that all Sudanese between the ages of eighteen and thirty 
would be subject to three years of compulsory military service. 

PDF recruits, who were conscripted from this universal and very unpopular draft, 
numbered 150,000 by the end of 1991. They were introduced to weaponry by 
instructors from the army, but their indoctrination was more religious than military and 
included interminable lectures on Islam delivered by known members of NIF and the 
Muslim Brothers. The indoctrination itself was entrusted to Ibrahim al-Sanoussi, a 
confidant of Hasan al-Turabi. He frequently lectured at PDF camps, and his speeches 
and Islamist propaganda were widely distributed. The fanatical Issa Bushra, another ally 
of Hasan al-Turabi and the former IARA director in El Obeid, was specifically 



responsible for training PDF in the strategic region of South Kordofan It was soon no 
secret that the Sudanese PDF would become neither an effective revolutionary guard 
nor an efficient paramilitary organization. It was a rabble in arms used by the Sudan 
army in its southern civil war as cannon fodder, whose depleted ranks had to be filled 
by force and unpopular conscription. Other newer PDF units consisting of urban youth 
experienced their first test in battle in the Blue Nile Province where they suffered heavy 
casualties at the hands of SPLA to the consternation of many professional families in 
Khartoum and Omdurman. 

The revolution, however, needed to have its Islamist praetorian guard, and in time the 
most dependable and most fanatical PDF units were deployed not in the rural areas 
where SPLA fought but in the major cities and, therefore, under civilian NIF control. 
Such armed units were more dependable than the police if civilian or student protests 
threatened to get out of control. In 1992 The Times of London reported that four PDF 
camps were being run by "Iranian and Arab" instructors trained by the "Hizbullah in 
Lebanon" both Sudanese expatriates and the Egyptian government claimed they had 
proof that Iranian advisers were involved in paramilitary training of PDF auxiliaries and 
the indoctrination of civilian cadres. [2231 Since it was virtually impossible to distinguish 
between those who were PDF recruits and those who only received military training in 
PDF camps, reports circulated in the Sudan and abroad that some of these camps 
were, in fact, used as special centers for the training of Sudanese Muslim Brothers and 
NIF cadres, and as safe havens and schools for international terrorists, including 
Afghan-Arabs ready to lead the Islamist revolution in Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and Egypt. 

During the war between the Muslim northern Sudan and its African South the Islamist 
government made no distinction between civil and military activity. Thus, Islamic 
charities were expected to assist and support the paramilitary PDF and, when called 
upon, the army. Agencies such as IBC and the Muwafaq Foundation worked closely 
with the government military and paramilitary forces, and the Nidda al-Jihad (Call for 
Jihad), yet another new "charity" approved by the government, helped fund PDF 
training camps and supported "the costs of military expeditions " In 1992 the Islamic 
NGOs were "well along in carrying out a highly politicized and highly directed relief 
operation that dovetails with the [government] programs to gradually exclude non-Islamic 
NGOs from working in Sudan," and all received government funds obtained through 
collection of zakat. [2241 Thus, Islamic charities operating in the Sudan might receive 
donations honestly given and charitable pledges from wealthy families of the Arab and 
Muslim world, but they were still subservient to a government that used them for its own 
purposes and not for the poor. In contrast, the non-Muslim foreign NGOs were regarded 
by the government of the Sudan as a nuisance whose activities must be circumscribed 
and their numbers drastically reduced. By spring 1991, of the eighty-three expatriate 
agencies that had operated in the Sudan prior to the 30 June Revolution only 
twenty-three remained, and most of those worked in the southern Sudan far from any 
association with the northern Sudanese. 



Turabi's presence 

During the eighteen months after the 30 June 1989 coup d'etat Hasan al-Turabi 
received little attention from the government-controlled media, and he maintained a low 
profile. Although Turabi was an intellectual and Islamic legal scholar, he was certainly 



better known than the new Sudanese president, Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, and his 
works were read throughout the Muslim world. Almost unnoticed, Turabi appeared in 
Chicago in December 1990 to attend a conference entitled Islam: The Road to Victory, 
where he supported the little-publicized Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP). ICP 
described itself as a charitable organization, but it would later be "identified by experts 
as part of a support network for terrorist groups. "[225] Also present at Chicago were his 
friends and a "Who's Who" of the Islamist movement, including Rashid al-Gannushi of 
Tunisia, Shaykh Abd al-Aziz Odeh of the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Khalil Shaqaqi 
of Al Najah University in Nablus, Shaykh Said Shaban of Lebanon, Shaykh Omar Abd 
al-Rahman from Egypt and Brooklyn, and Muslim Brothers from Egypt and Jordan. 
Publicly, they all supported the continuation of the Palestinian revolt (Intifada) and the 
liberation of Palestine, but they spent much of their private meetings discussing the 
prospect of an invasion of Iraq by the West, which they vehemently opposed. [2261 

After Iraq had been driven from Kuwait, Turabi organized the first Popular Arab and 
Islamic Congress (PAIC) in April 1991, a conclave of 300 Sudanese and 200 delegates 
from 45 states Like the great habubs (sandstorms) that periodically engulf Khartoum, 
Islamists, mullahs, and terrorists from the Muslim world made their way to the capital of 
the Sudan and the office of Hasan al-Turabi. Here they met with young men captivated 
and aroused by a spiritual experience unknown since the early years of the Muslim 
Brotherhood to lead the revival of Islam. Some sought to eradicate all western influence. 
Others were determined to destroy the state of Israel. There were intellectuals who 
argued that the insidious spread of western secularism had corrupted the true meaning 
of Islam and the incontrovertible union between Islam and the state. Pragmatic, 
ideological, jurisprudential, and theocratic, Turabi believed that the Islamist movement, 
symbolized by PAIC, was born at a time when the European, African, and Asian Muslim 
world was in confusion and turmoil. It sought to offer a universal Islamic religious 
structure to residents of secular Muslim states. With Hasan al-Turabi in the chair, the 
members of the General Assembly discussed, debated, and urged Muslims to turn away 
from the secular, hedonistic, and selfish proclivities of the West. They sternly rejected 
the morals and mores of the "Neo-Crusaders," which would continue to corrupt and 
erode the fundamental faith and meaning of Islamic culture. All the delegates rallied "to 
set the foundations for the establishment of the Armed Islamist International - the 
umbrella organization of the Sunni Islamist international terrorism affiliated with 
Teheran." Yasir Arafat played a leading role at the congress, and at the end its 
delegates established a permanent secretariat with Turabi as Secretary-General. [2271 

By 1991 Turabi's essays, tape recordings, videos, and radio broadcasts has made 
him a popular alim whose name was esteemed throughout the Muslim world. He thought 
of himself as navigating "a course of history" that made the establishment of Islamic 
states "almost inevitable." He believed that as more states became Islamic, many in the 
West would realize that Islam cannot be stopped, "and they will cease interfering. "[228] 
As founder of the PAIC General Assembly Turabi soon became a commanding figure in 
"the rejectionist front" that consisted of individuals and organizations controlled by 
Islamists and funded by Muslims who endorsed his call for the regeneration of Islam. 
His role as mediator in the HAMAS-PLO peace talks had demonstrated the power of his 
personality, ideology, and political presence. At first PAIC was dismissed, incorrectly, 
as simply another aspect of a growing "nationalist phenomenon" symbolized by the 
creation of Muslim institutes, media outlets, and think tanks that served as outreach 
agencies of the Islamic movement. Muslim governments had discovered the prestige that 



accompanied the sponsoring and funding of such institutions and their inevitable 
conferences. Turabi, however, had no intention of turning PAIC into just another Muslim 
debating society: its General Assembly and its permanent secretariat provided him with 
the instrument he needed to establish his political and religious influence throughout the 
Islamic world. He would proudly declare, "I am close to, I know every Islamic movement 
in the world, secret or public," and he regarded himself as the head of an Islamist 
movement dedicated to the "resurgence of new [political] action. " [2291 He was in 
contact with the Ikhwan and shaykhs active in Tajikistan and with the secretive Nahda 
parties in the other former Soviet republics of Central Asia, and corresponded with the 
mujahideen in Afghanistan and Kashmir. 

Strange political and religious bedfellows would come to meet with him in Khartoum. 
Sunni Sudan would join Shiite Iran to spread the message of the Islamist revival from 
West Africa to Mindanao. Turabi would keep apprised of Islamist warriors: Nur Hashim 
in the Philippines, Abd al-Quddus, the Burmese leader of the Arakan Liberation Front, 
and Islamist friends in the disintegrating Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the 
Horn of Africa he was the patron of the Islamic Ogaden Union that sought to overthrow 
the Christian Amhara-Tigrean Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi. He closely 
followed the activities of Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman in the USA, and welcomed to 
Khartoum Louis Farrakhan, the American black Muslim leader. Turabi soon became 
involved in the alliance between Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. Ironically, before relocating to 
the Sudan Al Qaeda had demonstrated little interest in cooperating with Shi'ite Iran until 
their relations improved immeasurably after a meeting between Osama bin Laden and 
Shaykh Nomani, the Iranian representative in Khartoum organized by Ahmad Abd 
al-Rahman Hamadabi, a Sudanese Sunni and scholar close to Turabi. Shortly thereafter 
a Bin Laden aide was instructed to arrange for Al Qaeda "militants" to receive "advance 
explosives" training for the destruction of large buildings in the Iranian-sponsored 
Hizbullah camps in Lebanon. 

After the success of the PAIC conference in 1991 Turabi took revenge on his political 
rivals. He was determined to immobilize the powerful Sudanese Sufi brotherhoods and 
their leaders - the Ansar of the Mahdi family, the Khatmiyya of the Mirghani, and the 
conservative Ansar Sunna sect - that over the years had opposed him in matters 
political, religious, and theocratic. Their followers grumbled but could only watch 
helplessly as the government imposed Islamist rule upon them. One well-informed 
journalist wrote that Turabi would "go to the last meter and even beyond it. As far as 
political power is concerned, he is as hard as steel. " [2301 Under the PAIC banner 
Turabi became the master of his Islamist revolution, whose influence could be found 
from Bosnia to the Philippines, and in the Muslim Chechnya region of Russia. In 
November 1993, when Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev publicly "urged the 
Islamic World to form an alliance against the West," Turabi and his PAIC were eager to 
help. [2311 An Al Qaeda operation to support the Chechen rebels was promptly 
organized, and mujahideen trained in Khartoum were funneled through Al Qaeda 
guesthouses and Islamic aid agencies in Ankara and Baku to training camps in 
Dagestan. 

In May 1991, one month after the first PAIC conference had come to a close, Hasan 
al-Turabi attended a congress of Algerian Islamic fundamentalists. Returning to the 
Sudan he made "a tour of some Arab and Islamic countries with the aim of coordinating 
the efforts of the fundamentalist organizations and parties in the Arab region. " [2321 
Given his views and his growing friendship with Bin Laden, who was now firmly in 



residence in Khartoum and had married Turabi's niece as his third wife, he surely knew 
of the support by Al Qaeda for the insurrection of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) 
against the Algerian government. It was also common knowledge that he assisted the 
passage of Afghan-Arabs through the Sudan to Algeria. When the Islamic Salvation 
Front (FIS), a party of both moderate and radical Islamists, won a round of 
parliamentary elections in December 1991, the National Liberation Front (FLN), a 
socialist party that had ruled Algeria since independence from France in 1992, nullified 
the results and banned FIS. The outcry soon turned violent and the paramilitary wing of 
FIS, which had begun to target the security forces, soon broke up into splinter groups, 
one of which was the GIA. Although GIA has never articulated its political goals with any 
precision, it was "rabidly anti-foreign, anti-Christian and [an] even more militant version 
of the FIS" in its determination to replace the secular Algerian regime with an Islamist 
state. [233] The hard core of GIA were some 1,500 Afghan-Arabs who operated in 
autonomous groups of fifty to a hundred mujahideen. GIA included such well-known 
Afghan-Arab mujahideen as Sid Ahmed Mourad (aka Jaafar al-Afghani, Kamar 
Kharban, Aissa Messaoudi, Tayeb al-Afghani), a former smuggler who led a famous but 
failed raid on a police station near the southeastern border with Tunisia in November 
1992. It was said that he had funds from Bin Laden as another manifestation of the 
covert assistance by Al Qaeda and from the Sudan government for those mujahideen 
headed for Algeria. 

As Algeria disintegrated the US State Department became increasingly concerned 
about the dangers of a massive immigration of North African Muslims into Europe: 
"Events in Algeria have inspired a young radical movement in many of Europe's slums 
and working-class suburbs where North African Muslims abound. " [2341 Much of this 
festering discontent coalesced in mosques from Norway to Bosnia and could be 
measured by the increasing participation in the use of charities to fund Islamist 
movements. Throughout the mid-1990s the governments of Egypt and Algeria 
"repeatedly asked Gulf governments to monitor the activities of charities that they said 
were funding Islamist militants." [2351 



Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi and Muwafaq 

Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi, a Jidda businessman, was an individual to whom 
coincidences seemed ordinary rather than unusual. When a delegation of influential 
Saudi businessmen, which included powerful men such as Ibrahim Effendi, Saleh 
Kamel, and Suleiman al-Rajhi, and was headed by Prince Faisal, visited the Sudan 
early in 1990 Yassin al-Qadi was hardly noticed. A friend and associate of Khaled bin 
Mahfouz, al-Qadi surprisingly won a bid to operate a scrap-metal project from the 
Islamist government, which only made awards to those who met with its full approval To 
manage his affairs in the Sudan he founded Leemount Limited in 1992 and registered it 
on the Isle of Man. Once accepted by the Sudanese Islamists, al-Qadi invested heavily 
in oil, banking (the Saudi-Sudanese Bank), and sesame sales. He opened accounts 
with Al Shamal, the bank of the Islamist insiders, claiming that its return on investment 
was far greater than that achieved by the Faisal Islamic Bank. Despite the fact that 
every Sudanese Islamist knew what was happening in Khartoum, he would later assert 
he was never aware that Bin Laden had invested in the Al Shamal Islamic Bank, and that 
he had made no personal use of Al Shamal after 1994. 



After al-Qadi had used NMCC to assist Khaled bin Mahfouz to introduce Islamic 
banking services at NCB, he began to move in the highest circles of Saudi Arabian 
finance. Bin Mahfouz had witnessed the challenging growth of the Al Rajhi bank, and 
used al-Qadi and NMCC to compete with his rival. It remains a mystery why Bin 
Mahfouz singled out al-Qadi, but after the latter's successful reorganization of NCB, he 
seemed to be the indispensable man. And when Khaled bin Mahfouz decided to found a 
charity in the Sudan in memory of his parents, he chose al-Qadi despite the fact that he 
had no previous experience in charitable work or charitable institutions. According to 
al-Qadi, Bin Mahfouz suggested Muwafaq Foundation (A Muwafaq Al Khariyya, 
Benevolent Foundation) for its name, and perhaps it was just a coincidence that in 1991 
al-Qadi had already registered his own Muwaffaq Ltd. (with the alternative spelling) on 
the Isle of Man as another "brass-plate" home for tax dodgers. Al-Qadi then used 
Muwaffaq Ltd. to establish Shifa International Hospitals Ltd. of Pakistan. 

The Muwafaq Foundation of Bin Mahfouz, a charitable trust, was registered in Jersey 
in 1991 Both Bin Mahfouz and al-Qadi chose to register their charities outside Saudi 
Arabia, and Jersey was an ideal site, a "self-governing island" that did not have a 
charities commission and did not require charities to register or issue reports, as 
required by the UK and Saudi Arabia. Officially, the Muwafaq Foundation did not really 
exist. Nevertheless, it had six trustees including al-Qadi, Abdul Rahman bin Mahfouz (the 
son of Khaled, aged twenty), Rais bin Mahfouz, a family member and doctor, and three 
other trustees appointed by al-Qadi. Strangely, Khaled bin Mahfouz refused to be a 
member of the board, but his son would act on his behalf. An obscure Sudanese, Siraj 
al-Din Bari, administered the Muwafaq program in the Sudan to provide food and 
assistance during a series of famines in 1991 and 1992, but the Muwafaq Foundation 
confined itself to the Muslim northern Sudan, leaving the delivery of food aid and other 
assistance in the non-Muslim southern Sudan to the western aid aqencies. [2361 
Muwafaq employees in 1992 were seen wearing military uniforms along the Ethiopian 
border where they supported PDF units in the Upper Nile. They also proselytized among 
the southern Sudanese in the Mayo Internally Displaced Camp located south of the 
Khartoum airport. Inexplicably, Muwafaq was not officially recognized until April 1993 
when it signed an agreement with the Commissioner General for Voluntary Agencies in 
the Sudan. Nevertheless, from the moment it began to work in 1992 the charity openly 
supported Sudan's Islamist government and had interests in the Chad, Ethiopia, and 
Eritrea borderlands. Although Muwafaq was not registered in Chad, authorities there 
were convinced that its local director was providing funds for Islamist extremists. [2371 

Shortly after Muwafaq opened in Khartoum in 1992, another office was established in 
Mogadishu, Somalia. There its purpose was defined as "general development" and 
consisted of transporting weapons and ammunition to Islamists in the city. Muwafaq also 
signed an agreement with the Ethiopian government in April 1993 but did little relief or 
rehabilitation work. Al-Qadi also established Muwafaq offices in the Balkans. He had 
visited the region in the early 1990s and registered the Muwafaq Foundation in Zagreb, 
Croatia, in November 1992. He then opened an office in Sarajevo the following year. 
From 1992 to 1996 the Muwafaq Foundation in the Balkans was managed by 
Director-General Chafiq Ayadi. Ayadi had been introduced to al-Qadi by the 
omnipresent Wael Julaidan, who was also involved in "relief work" in Croatia, whom he 
had known since the 1980s. When Ayadi was kidnapped in 1994 by angry Serbians 
who argued he only assisted Muslims, Yassin al-Qadi paid his ransom. Other Muwafaq 
Foundation offices were opened in Albania, Austria, and Germany in 1993. In the USA, 



Muwafaq was registered in Delaware in January 1992, and then in Holland and Belgium, 
but was not known to have established an active program in these countries. 

During the 1990s Yassin al-Qadi had been a very busy man. He was on the board of 
directors of the Al Haramain wa al-Masjed al-Aqsa (Two Holy Shrines and Al Aqsa) 
charity, registered in Saudi Arabia, and active in Sarajevo where he had been 
investigated by Bosnian authorities in 1992, who froze his assets, and later in Albania 
where he was suspected of financing indigenous mujahideen. His greatest predicament, 
however, was a report in Africa Confidential in July 1995 that a Muwafaq employee had 
been involved in the failed attempt to assassinate Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa on 26 
June 1995 during his state visit to Ethiopia. [2381 The article reported that Ethiopian 
authorities had "arrested a Sudanese, Siraj Mohamed Hussein, who claimed to work for 
the Addis branch of Moafak el Hairiya [Blessed Relief]," which was described as an 
"agency" of the NIF government in the Sudan. [2391 Shortly thereafter, the Ethiopian 
government ordered all Sudanese charities out of Ethiopia. 

Within the year al-Qadi officially terminated the Muwafaq Foundation, handing over its 
Sudan operations to the Sub-Saharan International Development Organization (SIDO) 
under Siraj al-Din Abdel Bari, who had previously headed Muwafaq. Once this was done 
Khaled bin Mahfouz sued Africa Confidential for libel. In August 1995, a British firm that 
specialized in libel cases issued a writ on behalf of six Saudi businessmen against 
Blackwell Publishers, the owners of Africa Confidential. The Saudis claimed that the 
article defamed them because they were the trustees of the Muwafaq Foundation 
registered in Jersey and the Muwaffaq registered on the Isle of Man. The plaintiffs were, 
however, very chary in providing information that would establish their own connection 
to the Muwafaq and their relationship to the offshore brass-plate offices registered in 
Jersey and the Isle of Man, or to the Muwafaq operating in Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, 
and Bosnia. Al-Qadi blamed all his and Muwafaq's problems on Africa Confidential, and 
the case dragged on in the British courts for six years until the judge found for the 
plaintiffs, who were granted costs and received a public apology from Africa Confidential 
in court. Al-Qadi would later assert that the "foundation sued the newsletter and 
won. "[2401 Ironically, when the suit was settled al-Qadi denied transferring Muwafaq to 
SIDO despite the fact that the UN office in the Sudan reported SIDO as the "former" 
Muwafaq and continued to provide $1.4 million for Muwafaq after the office had been 
closed. Khaled bin Mahfouz also brought a libel suit in London against US author Rachel 
Ehrenfeld. Ehrenfeld countered by bringing a suit in the US District Court, New York 
City, against Bin Mahfouz, who had objected to passages in her book Funding Evil, 
published in 2003. This important case was still being decided in mid-2005. 

In 1998 the FBI discovered that al-Qadi had transferred $820,000 to HAMAS through 
the Quranic Literacy Institute, a Chicago-based Islamic charity, but he denied that any 
funds from Muwafaq went to Bin Laden. "According to my records, I don't believe there 
is any chance any money has gone to bin Laden at any time. " [2411 After 9/11 the 
Foreign Assets Control Department of the US Treasury conducted its own investigation 
of Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi, whom they called a "wealthy businessman" used "by wealthy 
Saudi businessmen to transfer millions of dollars to Bin Laden." His assets in the USA 
were then frozen. 



Sudanese charities in Somalia 



Various Saudi charitable institutions had been working and spending substantial funds 
in Somalia from the 1980s, but during the next decade acrimonious tensions developed 
between the indigenous Islamic leaders and the new Islamists arriving from, of all 
places, the Sudan. Most mullahs in northern Somaliland, the former British protectorate 
that declared itself the Republic of Somaliland, resented the ideology and pretensions of 
the Sudanese Islamists, and after a long struggle, which continues to this day, they 
generally managed to retain their indigenous Islamic traditions despite the efforts of the 
Sudanese to change the character of traditional Islam in Somalia In the south, it would 
be a different matter. 

The first Islamic institution to have any major impact on the Somali Republic following 
its independence in 1960 was MWL, which asserted its supreme authority on all Islamic 
issues by establishing centers for training Islamic mullahs. [2421 Islam had been 
confined to the mosque during the regime of Socialist President Mohamed Siad Barre 
(1976-1991), but he lost control of the Democratic Republic of Somalia in January 
1991. Thereafter, Somalia dissolved into chaos and civil wars as the clan-based militias 
fought one another in the political vacuum to gain the powers and privileges previously 
enjoyed by Siad Barre. By the end of 1991 a dozen clan elders or warlords whose 
infighting nearly destroyed the capital, Mogadishu, had wreaked havoc in the 
countryside, already devastated by famine from the continuing drought. 

Shortly after his arrival in Khartoum Osama bin Laden was the first of the mujahideen 
in the Sudan to take any interest in Somalia. After a succession of reconciliation 
conferences had failed to end the "battle of the warlords," by 1992 Bin Laden was eager 
to fill the political vacuum in southern Somalia. In Mogadishu General Muhammad Farah 
Aideed, an unpredictable and unorthodox Muslim, held the advantage, and it was to 
Mogadishu that Bin Laden sent three teams to determine if Al Qaeda could help 
establish an Islamist regime. In northern Somalia the Afar demonstrated little interest, for 
they were conducting their own jihad against Ethiopia in the Ogaden, led by graduates 
from Islamic universities, especially the Islamic University of Medina. In southern 
Somalia, however, Al Qaeda agents were more successful in establishing cordial 
relations with the friendly Ittihad al-lslami mujahideen and the Urn Rehan clan, whose 
turf extended from Mogadishu to the Kenya border, which enabled them to set up cells 
in Somalia and nearby Kenya with support from hardcore Islamists in the Sudan 
government. In March 1992 the sinister Abd al-Bagi Muhammad Hassan was appointed 
Sudanese ambassador to Somalia, and the Sudanese embassy in Mogadishu soon 
became the center of Islamist operations and hostility against the UN. Ali Mahdi 
Muhammad, the former interim president of the United Somali Congress (USC) and the 
most powerful opponent of Muhammad Farah Aideed, publicly hailed the new relations 
between Somalia and Sudan and thanked Khartoum for food aid sent at a time when 
hundreds of thousands of Sudanese were starving in their own country from the 
drought. [2431 

By the New Year 1993 widespread famine and endemic banditry galvanized the UN to 
approve Security Council Resolution 794, which authorized the delivery of food, 
medicine, and other assistance to a million Somalis in the south and required the UN to 
restore order in a failed state. Hitherto the efforts of the international relief agencies had 
been blocked by the warlords defending their own territory. This forced the UN, 
members of Congress, and the western relief agencies to realize that military force 



would be required to protect the distribution of food in an increasingly violent region, 
where the number of Somalis dying from starvation would rapidly escalate. Led by US 
Marines in Operation Restore Hope, the UN launched the United Nations International 
Task Force (UNITAF), which quickly secured all seaports, airports, and delivery routes 
into Somalia to be followed in May 1993 by the United Nations Operation in Somalia II 
(UNOSOM II) with a broad mandate to facilitate national reconciliation and rebuild the 
country's shattered economy. UNOSOM II failed dismally, and in March 1995 the UN 
withdrew from Somaliland. 

The anarchy in Somalia was grist for the Islamist mill. On behalf of Al Qaeda Ayman 
Zawahiri "first set up Bin Laden's East Africa networks," and by 1993 "such 
organizations [networks] had been used to disguise Bin Laden's presence in the south 
of Somalia. " [2441 Al Qaeda was now moving arms and men between Khartoum and 
Mogadishu, for there was a "coincidence of interest" between the Islamists and the USC 
Hawiye clan led by Ali Mahdi against Farah Aideed, for whom Al Qaeda had little 
respect. [2451 Despite support from Ali Mahdi's forces and other mujahideen, however, 
Al Qaeda failed to dislodge Aideed from his redoubt in Mogadishu's northern quarter, 
but he was so threatened by Al Qaeda that he began portraying himself as "a 
born-again Muslim fundamentalist." Given the fragile and volatile nature of Somali 
society, where Islamist groups offered the best-organized social support structures, 
"any alliance between Aideed and radical Islam" created a "potentially very dangerous 
engagement indeed. "[246] William Millward, a Canadian government anti-terrorism 
expert, was among the first to appreciate "the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism" in 
the Horn of Africa by an incipient Iran-Sudan network. He reported in April 1993 that 
there were "signs of expanding joint Iranian/Sudanese contacts with Islamic militants in 
Somalia. "[247] Seemingly from nowhere, the warring clans were by 1993 armed with 
automatic weapons, mortars, grenades, and landmines, and the last vestiges of law and 
order disappeared. [2481 

In January a UNICEF doctor was killed at Bossaso and a CARE representative 
wounded by "fundamentalists who were well-trained, armed, financed and equipped, 
apparently with Iranian and Sudanese money. "[249] At the time there were as many as 
forty-nine UN and expatriate NGOs operating in Somalia, far outnumbering the Islamist 
aid agencies working independently from the UN. As in Afghanistan in 1989 and the 
Sudan in 1990, every effort was made by the Islamists to eliminate the western NGOs in 
order to ensure, undisturbed, the work of Islamic relief agencies. Although the 
Sudanese charities could not "match even private Saudi financial resources," they were 
determined to assist the foreign charities, including Islamic Call, Mercy International 
from Ireland, IARA, IIRO, and the Muwafaq Foundation. In Khartoum the government 
used its Council for International People's Friendship to extend brotherly financial aid to 
Somalia, and other Sudanese organizations, including the Sudan Peace and 
Development Foundation and the National Youth Organization Association, were active 
in Somalia as early as December 1992. In 1992-1993 the Sudan government had sent 
100,000 tons of food aid to Somalia and supposedly provided scholarships for 10,000 
Somali students. [250] Khartoum's support for Aideed predated the Somali famine, and 
for more than a year the Sudan was the only government to oppose UN intervention. 
From the initial UN involvement, the Khartoum regime argued that only Islamic relief 
agencies should operate in Somalia. By late 1992, relief supplies were arriving at 
Merca, a minuscule port just south of Mogadishu. There, Red Cross barges were met by 
Red Crescent personnel. Aid shipments were guarded by armed Islamic Union Party (Al 



Ittihad) mujahideen, who had eliminated the problem of looting relief supplies. 

Despite a succession of operations dominated by the UN presence in southern 
Somalia - UNOSOM I (August-December 1992), Operation Restore Hope (UNITAF, 
December 1992-April 1993), and UNOSOM II (initiated May 1993) - both the UN 
administration and the US military and civilian leaders were appallingly ignorant of the 
activities and objectives of the Islamist aid agencies, whose operations were naively 
regarded as legitimate humanitarian relief programs. Among the seven principal Kuwaiti 
charities, whose objectives were the spread of Islamist movements, the Committee for 
Helping Muslims of Asia and Africa operated only in Somalia. [2511 After the departure 
of US forces and the marginalizing of the UN, southern Somalia, for all practical 
purposes, had become Islamist. Mujahideen, led by the "militant Muslim leader" Ahmad 
Bille Hassan, received support from Al Qaeda and were reported to be receiving arms 
through the Sudan. [2521 Other Somali Islamists, supported by Osama bin Laden and 
Hasan al-Turabi, plotted the progressive Islamization of northern Somalia, the 
self-proclaimed Somaliland. 

By 2000 the "presence and influence of radical Islamists [was] felt everywhere" in the 
north, and the governing element in Hargeisa was considering the adoption of Shari'a. 
"Feeding centers for the displaced are eagerly funded by wealthy Saudi 
fundamentalists; Koranic academies run by Somali fundamentalists are sprouting 
throughout the country to educate a significant percentage of the school-aged 
population; and clandestine centers training 'Islamic warriors' are reputedly scattered in 
various locations. " [2531 After the departure of Osama bin Laden from the Sudan in May 
1996 Sudanese assistance to the Somali warlords soon declined and education became 
the center of its charitable works. Scholarships were provided for Somali students to 
attend Sudanese schools and to assist them upon their return to acquire positions of 
influence which they could use to benefit the Sudan. The Non-Sudanese Students' 
Welfare Organization (NSSWO), a branch of Islamic Call, provided room, board, and 
tuition, and Somali students were eligible for WAMY funds for education at AIU in 
Khartoum. 



Al Qaeda and Islamic charities in East Africa 

During his years in the Sudan Osama bin Laden had adroitly used Islamic charities to 
further the projects of Al Qaeda. In 1992 he ordered Ali Mohammed to seek possible US 
targets in East Africa, and upon his return to Khartoum Bin Laden was particularly 
interested in his photographs of the American embassy in Nairobi. Mohammed was 
immediately sent back to Kenya to establish an Al Qaeda cell in the capital, where he 
opened a fishing business, a luxury auto lot, and a store selling precious gems as cover 
for at least twelve Al Qaeda members who joined him. Bin Laden wanted to bomb two US 
embassies simultaneously for maximum shock value, and those in Nairobi and Dar es 
Salaam were found to be vulnerable. On 7 August 1998 the plan succeeded when a 
truck carrying bombs crashed through the barriers at the US embassy in Nairobi, killing 
224 people and injuring thousands. The Al Qaeda bombers had used the Kenya office 
of Mercy International as cover, and Osama bin Laden regularly contacted its Director, 
Ahmad Sheik Adam, by satellite phone. Wadih al-Hage, who planned the embassy 
bombings, kept his files in the Nairobi office that contained a rolodex with the business 
cards of Mercy International personnel in Kenya and the USA. 



Although US, Kenyan, and Tanzanian agents were quite successful in rounding up the 
mujahideen responsible for the atrocities, Al Qaeda activity in East Africa was not 
finished. In 2003 members of the Tanzanian branch of the Saudi charity Al Haramain 
Islamic Foundation planned but failed to bomb several hotels in Zanzibar; that led to 
international financial sanctions against the Tanzanian and Kenyan branches of the 
Foundation. Both the Kenyan and Tanzanian offices were linked to Osama bin Laden 
and Al Qaeda, and were in contact with mujahideen in Somalia. [2541 In Uganda 
Alirabaki Kyagulanyi (aka Shaykh Jamil Mukulu), who worked out of locations in 
London, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Kenya, actively recruited jihadists from the Allied 
Democratic Forces (ADF). ADF leadership was dominated by Islamists, and during the 
1990s it sent jihadists to Osama bin Laden training-camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere 
in the Middle East. [2551 In Malawi the Director of the Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz 
Special Committee for Relief (SCR) was among five people arrested in 2003 "on 
suspicion of channeling money to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network." He was the "manager 
of religious affairs in the Saudi Army" and a Major General who was also responsible for 
SCR charities in Mali and Nigeria. He and a second individual, "a Sudanese director of 
the Islamic Zakaat Fund," were deported, interrogated, and released in the Sudan. With 
great indignation Saudi Arabia demanded an apology but closed the SCR office. [2561 



Islamic charities in West Africa 

When Osama bin Laden moved to the Sudan in 1991 the Islamist penetration of West 
Africa, unlike eastern Africa, was insignificant. Hasan al-Turabi and his PAIC had 
attracted radical Muslim clerics from Nigeria, Senegal, and Mauritania but their 
influence and followers were regional rather than national: "The true Islamic state has 
remained an ideal so far in the African setting because, in most cases, some 
pre-lslamic habits, traditions and beliefs" are deeply rooted. There is little information on 
obligatory almsgiving in West Africa because zakat was not widespread among Muslim 
African societies in the Western Sudan. There is even less known about permanent 
endowment in property or money (waqf) to support mosques, hospitals, or schools. Thus 
the "third pillar" of Islam was "based on voluntary almsgiving, or sadaqa, and not zakat 
nor wagf." [2571 In those patriarchal communities in West Africa where Muslims were in 
the minority or intermixed with other religious practices, "almsgiving was not a voluntary 
act or private moral obligation, but part of the public sphere." Within this "sphere of 
communities of believers within a society of non-believers" the collection of zakat was 
handled in the way the Quranic ideal had prescribed, i.e. "being collected from all 
members by the imam or shaykh who disbursed it among the poor, needy, wayfarers 
and collectors. " [2581 

In the few instances where regular collection and distribution of alms did occur, MWL, 
which appeared in West Africa shortly after its founding in 1962, was very active As 
was the case in Somalia, it sought to coordinate and spread Islam throughout the region 
by constructing hundreds of mosques and establishing Islamic centers in Mauritania 
and Nigeria. Twenty years later in 1982 the Dar al-Mal al-lslami Investment Corporation 
(DMI) under the chairmanship of Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia began a determined 
effort to increase the influence of Islam in West Africa by the introduction of Islamic 
banking. DMI founded masraf, as local banks were called, in Guinea, Senegal, and 



Niger. Each had an authorized capital of $20 million, and DMI retained a majority of 
shares. "Along with any masraf, the DMI always sets up a takful, or insurance company, 
and a Business Group, or investment company." Its first major success occurred in 
Guinea where Saudi-sponsored activity attracted both foreign and local investment in 
various projects, including an oil refinery .[259] 

In Nigeria foreign support for Islamic charitable works first began in 1983 with the visit 
of a pan-Islamic delegation organized and led by Prince Faisal representing DMI. 
Businessmen from Pakistan, Britain, and Ireland who accompanied the prince 
established a fund of $650,000 to assist the Nigeria Islamic Foundation, founded in 
1971, to build more madrasas and provide teachers and scholarships in religious and 
Arabic studies. f260] Still, foreign assistance generally came from the banking sector, 
and the banks themselves were run on western banking principles although lending was 
generally limited to the Islamic community alone. Nigeria as a center of Islamic date, 
education, and teacher training was given added impetus in 2002 when the Islamic 
Movement for Africa (IMA), ostensibly a non-political, non-governmental, and non-profit 
Islamic organization, was founded "to serve as the institutional base for the promotion of 
Islam in Africa." Three Egyptian scholars were present, including an official from the Al 
Azhar Islamic Research Academy, Professor Abdul Satar Abdul-Haq al-Halwagy. 
Al-Halwagy represented two opposing themes of Islamic outreach in Africa. He had 
been the recipient of the King Faisal International Award for Islamic Studies in 1998, 
and he was a representative of an Egyptian government that had never denounced 
pan-Africanism and that traced its roots to the secular socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser. 



Chapter 6 Islam at war in the Balkans 



There can be no peace or co-existence between the "Islamic faith" and non-Islamic 
societies and political institutions . . . Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of 
activity of any strange ideology on its own turf. (p. 22) 

The Islamic movement should and must start taking over the power as soon as it is 
morally and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the existing non-Islamic, 
but also to build up a new Islamic authority, (p. 43) 

Alija Izetbegovic, "Islamska deklaracija" (Islamic Declaration), 1970/1990 



Alija Izetbegovic was born on 8 August 1925 in Bosanski Samac, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 
into a wealthy family that moved to Sarajevo in 1928. He grew up in a multicultural 
society and was educated at a German Gymnasium where, at the age of sixteen, he 
founded the Muslim Youth Society of Bosnia, modeled on the Muslim Brotherhood of 
Egypt. Seemingly innocuous but designed to be secretive, the Society concealed its 
more subversive activities by charitable works. He graduated from the Gymnasium in 
1943 and studied agriculture for the next three years. Despite his bookish manner he 
worked assiduously to promote Islam by publishing, with Nedzib Sacirbey, the journal 
Mujahid, which immediately brought both of them to the attention of the communist 
authorities in Yugoslavia, whose motto, "Brotherhood and Unity," did not permit any 
dissent by Muslims. He and Sacirbey were imprisoned in 1946 for three years, and 
upon his release in 1949 the government sought to contain Izetbegovic's Islamic 
activities by cracking down on the Muslim Youth Society for their activism, sentencing 
four members to death and imprisoning many more. Izetbegovic quietly tempered his 
pan-Islamic rhetoric, having learned in jail that he could be of greater help to his fellow 
Muslims by knowing and using the Yugoslav legal system. He graduated in 1956 with a 
law degree from the University of Sarajevo to become a moderate Muslim lawyer 
working as a legal adviser to trucking firms in Sarajevo and representing his fellow 
anti-communist Muslims in the courts. 

Somehow Izetbegovic managed to survive, despite his Islamist views and his widely 
distributed "Islamic Declaration" of 1970 which urged true Muslims to seize power from 
secular Islamic governments, after which western institutions would not be tolerated. 
Bosnian Muslims (officially known as "Bosniaks") were to abandon any idea of a 
multi-ethnic secular society and, instead, work for a federation of Balkan Islamic 
States. [26 11 He was imprisoned again in 1983, sentenced to fourteen years on the 
charge of disseminating "Islamic propaganda" aimed at turning Bosnia into an Islamic 
state. Like his hero, Sayyid Qutb, he wrote his seminal work, Islam Between East and 
West, in prison. It condemned the West for its denial of Islam, for ignoring the 
contributions to civilization made by Muslims, and offered a critical comparison of 
secular and Islamic civilization using examples from art, morality, culture, and law. 
Smuggled out of prison in 1984, the book was banned in France, but it became an 
instant best-seller throughout Europe during the 1980s. After serving five years, he was 
released in 1988 His defense of Muslims in the courts, his advocacy of Islam, his 



writings, and his imprisonment had won for him a large following among the Bosniaks, 
particularly in the rural areas where he became a father figure reverently called 
"Deedo," Grandpa. 

Journalists and diplomats alike were beguiled by Izetbegovic's professed reverence for 
democracy and human rights in a multi-ethnic society Behind this fatherly facade, 
however, lay a complex man - intelligent, calculating, and strong in his convictions that 
Islam would prevail "in every field in the personal life of the individual, in family and 
society . . . and the establishment of a unique Islamic community from Morocco to 
Indonesia" that would not tolerate equality or coexistence with non-Muslims. No sooner 
had he been released from jail than he sought to exploit his fame politically by founding 
the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA). He argued that in the future of 
Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic would speak for the Serbs and Franjo Tudjman for the 
Croats, rallying Bosniaks with the slogan "Who will speak for you? Alija Izetbegovic!" In 
the multiparty Bosnian elections of 1990 its Muslims, 44 percent of the population, 
elected Alija Izetbegovic President of Bosnia-Herzegovina. 

When Serbia and Croatia declared their independence from the Socialist Federal 
Republic of Yugoslavia and the federation began to disintegrate in May 1991, 
Izetbegovic at first assumed a stance of moderate neutrality that satisfied few. He then 
sought to resolve the issue by a referendum on the independence of 
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Bosnia Serbs boycotted the referendum, and on 3 March 
1992 Izetbegovic proclaimed Bosnia-Herzegovina an independent republic. The Bosnia 
Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic, rebelled, seized 70 percent of the country, and then 
enforced a policy of ethnic cleansing to "purify" the country by expelling the Bosniaks. 
Supported by fellow Serbs from the new Republic of Serbia the Bosnia Serbs wreaked 
havoc among the Bosniaks, driving them from their homes as 2.5 million Muslims fled 
into refugee camps while others were confined in Serbian concentration camps, where 
torture and rape were common. An estimated 350,000 Bosniaks were killed. From his 
sandbagged office and apartment in Sarajevo Izetbegovic sought to rally his people. The 
West saw this terrible conflict as a clash of cultures; the Muslim world understood it to 
be a jihad. 



Afghanistan in Bosnia 

In the early months of 1992 the Islamists, determined to come to the rescue of their 
fellow Muslims in Bosnia, utilized the lessons - military, political, and religious - they 
had learned in Afghanistan. Throughout the Muslim world, but especially from 
Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and Yemen, mujahideen were on the move to 
Bosnia. They were followed by military advisers, mullahs, Islamic bankers, and Islamic 
charities. Assistance from Saudi Arabia began to arrive in Bosnia in 1993. In December 
1992 King Fahd had met with Izetbegovic and promised the Bosniak leader unstinting 
Saudi support. A Supreme Committee for the Collection of Donations for the Muslims of 
Bosnia was established, and Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, Governor of Riyadh, 
assumed the coordination of seven major Islamic charities - MWL, Al Haramain, IIRO, 
WAMY, SARCS, the Islamic Waqf Organization, and the Makkah Humanitarian 
Organization - which operated in Bosnia through offices in Zagreb, Sarajevo, and 
Tuzla. Millions of dollars from Saudi charities poured into Bosnia in support of the 



Bosniaks and mujahideen jihadists who had come to fight for them. "Fundraising" weeks 
were common throughout Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world. Two-thirds of the funds 
that passed through Prince Salman's Supreme Committee were delivered directly to the 
Bosniak government, "either through a dedicated bank account, through the Bosnian 
Embassy in Riyadh, or by delivery to President Izetbegovic personally." The remainder 
purchased supplies "without the requirement of accountability" and was given to needy 
individuals and the eight Bosnia centers supported by the Supreme Committee. 12621 

From the outbreak of the conflict in the Balkans and for the next decade, the Saudi 
Supreme Committee was the largest fundraiser in the Muslim world. Saudi assistance 
for the Bosniaks could be compared favorably to Islamic charitable funds that had 
supported the jihadists in Afghanistan. Between 1992 and February 1996 King Fahd bin 
Abd al-Aziz was personally responsible for $103 million of the total Saudi donations for 
the Bosniak government of $356 million. 12631 By 1997 the Muslim states and "various 
extremist groups and informal institutions" had reportedly sent more than $1 billion in 
military and humanitarian aid to Bosnia. [2641 Later, according to estimates supplied by 
the Saudi embassy in Sarajevo, the Supreme Committee, now renamed the Saudi High 
Relief Commission (SHRC) for Bosnia, was responsible for donations in excess of $561 
million by 2000. A Bosniak government investigation on its own initiative determined that 
SHRC had actually spent an estimated $800 million in support of da\va and humanitarian 
projects in Bosnia. 

A small number of Afghan-Arabs had arrived in Bosnia in the first few months of 1992, 
to be followed by many of the Islamic charities that had been active in Peshawar. The 
lightly armed Bosniak army was soon overwhelmed by Serbian artillery and tanks, and 
by the autumn of 1992 President Izetbegovic was appealing to his fellow Muslims for 
arms and men to fight the Serbs. There were thousands of Afghan-Arabs in the Middle 
East ready and willing, and in his appeal he made it abundantly clear that this was not 
just a fight for the Bosniaks but for Islam. An experienced diplomat with many years in 
the Balkans succinctly rendered his judgment of Alija Izetbegovic: "There is no doubt 
that he is an Islamic fundamentalist ... He is a very nice fundamentalist, but he is still a 
fundamentalist. This has not changed His goal is to establish a Muslim state in Bosnia, 
and the Serbs and Croats understand this better than the rest of us. " [2651 In October 
Izetbegovic met with Iranian leaders in Tehran to thank them for their "over-all support," 
but with winter approaching he required not only more arms but food and fuel. [2661 At 
the same time in the mountains of western Herzegovina a contingent of Afghan-Arabs 
led by Abu Abdul Aziz of Al Qaeda numbered in the hundreds and protected the Saudi 
volunteers of the Ibrahim bin Abdul-Aziz al-lbrahim Fund. The volunteers were working 
to build a road from Split on the coast to the hills near Sarajevo that would skirt the 
Serbian fortified positions and provide food and blankets for the Muslim refugees who 
had swarmed into Travnik. Its headquarters were little more than an "office with a brass 
plate on the door" at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Zagreb, Croatia. [2671 

Although some $70-100 million in food aid and cash from Saudi Arabia were tunneled 
into Bosnia during the early months of the war, the Saudi government firmly refused to 
become involved in any direct shipment of arms. It left that task to others, just as it had 
in Afghanistan. [2681 While the Saudis supplied cash, construction crews, and trucks for 
Izetbegovic, Iran had already begun to provide the guns. In 1992 it was the only Islamic 
state caught breaking the UN arms embargo imposed on all of Yugoslavia when its 
officials at the Zagreb airport inspected a gunrunning Iranian 747 supposedly carrying 
relief supplies. At the meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) held 



in December 1992 Iran advocated a "Final Declaration" allowing Islamic states to arm 
the Bosniaks if the UN and "the West" did not take action to end the fighting by 
mid-January 1993. [2691 In January the Italian navy intercepted a major Islamic arms 
shipment near the port of Rijeka, Croatia: it was a new route for arms and considered 
more dependable than the older overland route from Salonika on the Aegean Sea 
through Macedonia. [270] The following month a secret meeting was held in Tehran by 
the principal Islamist terrorist groups determined to provide the men, weapons, and 
relief assistance to save the Bosniaks. The fighting between the Muslims of Bosnia, on 
the one hand, and Christian Serbs and Croats, on the other, had already taken 20,000 
lives and more than 1.6 million were classified as homeless "Internally Displaced 
Persons (IDPs)." Another 150,000 Muslims were threatened with starvation, including 
thousands huddled in the ruins of Sarajevo. [2711 Ominously, there were rumors that 
Russia was prepared to provide $360 million in weapons to Serbia that would obviously 
find their way to the Serbian-controlled areas of Bosnia and Croatia. [2721 

By April 1993 Muslim volunteers had begun to trickle into Bosnia, and by June the 
numbers of Afghan-Arab mujahideen had substantially increased. Veterans from the 
war in Afghanistan and volunteers from the Sudan and other Muslim countries arrived 
posing as Islamic aid workers. In May, at a ceremony in Tehran, the first Ambassador 
from the Muslim government of Bosnia-Herzegovina presented his credentials and 
publicly praised Iran for its "relief assistance" - which in fact consisted of large 
shipments of arms and little or no food. [273] Then a large consignment of weapons from 
Iran via the Sudan disguised as humanitarian aid for Bosnia was discovered by UN 
officials at the Maribor airport in Slovenia. The find confirmed the role Sudan was 
playing in illegal arms shipments; this not only violated the UN arms embargo affecting 
the warring parties in Bosnia, it also implicated members of the Slovenian secret service 
and, indirectly, the Austrian Ministry of Interior. In fact a Slovenian "economic team," 
which included the Minister for Transportation and Communication and officials of the 
Slovenian national airline, had just visited Iran where three agreements were signed, 
including the establishment of air and sea links between the two republics.[274] 

Austrian journalists investigating the illegal arms shipment at the Maribor airport soon 
learned that both Slovenian security agents and the Austrian Ministry of Interior were 
providing funds for the Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic in Sarajevo. [2751 
Although the Austrian Foreign Minister, Alois Mock, strongly urged that "the only 
solution" to end the slaughter of Bosniaks by the Serbs was "military intervention by the 
international community," he also argued that the right of self-defense should be 
ensured, "and that Austria was both willing and able to help the beleaguered Bosnian 
Muslims."[276] That policy was not solely driven by humanitarian concerns, however, for 
the Austrian Ambassador to Iran succinctly pointed out in 1993 that Iran was Austria's 
"third biggest business partner," and he affirmed that "his country, too, is a reliable 
partner for Iran. "[277] 

The fact that Shi'ite Iran had taken over supplying weapons to the Bosniaks deeply 
troubled the less militant Sunni members of OIC who called an extraordinary meeting at 
Islamabad in July to discuss the problem of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Sudan boycotted 
the OIC meeting, which was historically dominated by the Sunni Saudis, and offered 
instead the PAIC of Hasan al-Turabi as host and Khartoum as a more suitable venue 
than Islamabad. The sixteen ministers attending the OIC meeting ignored the Sudanese 
invitation and urged the UN to lift its arms embargo; they offered to send a 17,000-man 
Islamic peace-keeping unit, including 10,000 troops from Iran, which would double the 



proposed UN peace-keeping force of 7,600 troops, for which only France had pledged 
men and materiel. The UN, however, thought that the arrival of a Muslim force would 
only exacerbate the situation, and the OIC proposal was not accepted, nor was the arms 
embargo lifted. [2781 

In September 1993 a Turkish newspaper reported that 1,300 mujahideen from Iran 
and other Muslim countries were already fighting in Bosnia, but the figure was certainly 
conservative. [2791 A few months later the UK Home Office, not wishing to give the 
impression of accepting the presence of the Afghan-Arabs in Bosnia, refused to grant 
visas to representatives from "the Islamic movement" in Bosnia, Lebanon, Palestine, 
Albania, Tunisia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the Sudan who were bound for London to hold 
a meeting on Bosnia. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a member of Iran's Council of 
Guardians, was also refused entry as was Shaykh Iz al-Din, the Hizbullah Party foreign 
minister. By 1994 more than 500 Afghan-Arabs from South Asia alone had arrived in 
Bosnia, congregating near Muslim-held Zenica, and there were an increasing number of 
military firefights involving Afghan-Arab mujahideen. A British humanitarian aid worker 
was murdered near Zenica in January 1994, and shortly afterward three mujahideen 
carrying fake Pakistani passports and representing a Muslim charity were killed by 
Bosnian military police at a roadblock near Sarajevo. By the early months of 1994 
mujahideen and money were pouring into Bosnia. 

Like Saudi Arabia the Gulf states were particularly generous in providing substantial 
funds for the Bosniaks. The UAE Red Crescent Society was especially active, and its 
wealthy shaykhs a soft touch, but the total amount donated would never be known, for 
they dealt mostly in cash. [2801 The UAE Human Appeals International (Hayat al-Amal 
al-Khariyya, HAI) opened offices in Zagreb and Tuzla and collected funds for Bosnia in 
such disparate places as Khartoum, Nouakchott, Mauritania, and Denmark. Its 
headquarters was in Dubai, and HAI had a direct connection with the Palestinian 
HAMAS and maintained ties to both the Muwafaq Foundation and the Qatar Charitable 
Society. The latter's office in Khartoum was used on occasion by Al Qaeda members 
while Osama bin Laden was active in the Sudan. 

The Islamic World Committee (Lajnat al-Alam al-lslami), the Social Reform Society of 
Kuwait, and the International Islamic Charitable Organization (I ICO) founded in 1986 
were all Kuwaiti charities suspected of supporting mujahideen. The Social Reform 
Society (Jamiyat al-lslah al-ljtimai), established in 1982 and closely associated with the 
Kuwait Muslim Brotherhood, had by 1995 offices in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zagreb, Albania, 
Bulgaria, and Austria Of the fifty major indigenous charities in Kuwait, it was the most 
strongly suspected of supporting terrorists. (It was declared a terrorist operation by the 
Russian Supreme Court in 2003). Another suspected charity was the Lijnat al-Da'wa, a 
Kuwaiti charity active in the Balkans. It had operated from Peshawar in the 1980s under 
Zahid Shaykh Muhammad, brother of Khaled Shaykh Muhammad who had planned the 
9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The support given by these four charities 
remains unknown, for as a Kuwaiti succinctly put it: "We believe charity should not be 
given publicly. No receipts, no donor lists - giving charity for recognition devalues it. 
The organizations who keep books and follow the rules are the ones being wiped out. 
The ones who work in the traditional way - you'll never know who they are. " [2811 



Al Muwafaq Brigade 



After a visit to Bosnia, the journalist Robert Fisk traveled to Khartoum late in 1993 to 
interview the elusive Osama bin Laden. After Fisk obtained a meeting with Hasan 
al-Turabi, and perhaps through Turabi's intervention, Bin Laden granted a rare interview 
to a western reporter. When Fisk informed Bin Laden that "Bosnian Muslim fighters in 
the Bosnian town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me," the Saudi expatriate added 
laconically that only a small number of mujahideen had gone to fight in Bosnia because 
"the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. " [2821 The 
ease with which one could cross back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan did 
not exist in the Balkans, for the Croats had made it difficult for the Afghan-Arabs to pass 
through their country. Whether Bin Laden himself had ever traveled from the Sudan to 
Bosnia is not clear, but he had been issued a Bosnia-Herzegovina passport in 1993 by 
the Bosnian embassy in Vienna. 

In 1992 the El Moujahed (Al Mujahideen) unit, consisting of Afghan-Arabs, was 
organized and loosely attached to the Bosniak army. It soon acquired a reputation for 
ferocity that even frightened Bosnian jihadists, and within months attracted to its ranks 
"volunteers from all over the Islamic world whose passage to Bosnia was facilitated by 
Al-Qaeda. El Moujahed was the nursery from which an international terrorist network 
spread to Europe and North America. "1283] By June 1993 the Afghan-Arab El 
Moujahed had established themselves near Travnik, where they formed a "Mujahideen 
Battalion," known as the Al Muwafaq Brigade, which operated throughout Bosnia's 
Zenica region. Consisting of 750 Afghan-Arabs, the Brigade had Iranian "advisers" and 
was commanded by an Egyptian Afghan-Arab. [2841 Perhaps by coincidence the Al 
Muwafaq Brigade had taken the same name as the Muwafaq Foundation established in 
the Sudan in 1991 by Khaled bin Mahfouz, which, not surprisingly, was reported to have 
ties to the Al Muwafaq Brigade. 

By 1995 the Muwafaq Foundation was only one of many Islamic charities operating in 
Bosnia with offices in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Split, Zenica, Tirana, and Tuzla, but by then it 
had become well known that the Foundation was supplying money for the Al Muwafaq 
Brigade and at least one camp in Afghanistan training mujahideen for Bosnia. In March 
1995 the Foundation opened an office in Karlsruhe, Germany, ostensibly to collect 
funds for Bosniak refugees The office moved to Munich the following year and worked 
in tandem with an office in Vienna that had been established in 1993. On 31 July 1995 a 
US Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) report indicated that the Muwafaq 
Foundation office in Zagreb was a front for Osama bin Laden's operations. Six months 
later, in February 1996, Al WatanAI Arabi, a Paris-based Arab journal, published what it 
claimed was an interview with Bin Laden who listed the "Muwafaq Society" in Zagreb as 
part of a network of humanitarian organizations he supported. Yassin al-Qadi, the 
Foundation's administrator, strongly denied any involvement with the mujahideen. He 
added that the Al Muwafaq Brigade had already ceased to exist as a combat unit, and 
its jihadists were reduced to weapons instructors. Two years later, in 1998, the Muwafaq 
Foundation closed its office in Bosnia, and its only other project, an Islamic school in 
Risala, was turned over to a Bosnian corporation. 



Sudanese connections 



When Al Tayib Zein al-Abdin, a shadowy Sudanese intelligence agent and principal 
liaison officer for the Iran-Sudan task force in Somalia during 1992-1993, appeared in 
Bosnia in June 1994, veteran volunteers from the Sudan had already been incorporated 
into the Bosniak army. Sudanese C-130s, which had been used to transport Iranian 
arms from Port Sudan to small airfields in Somalia, were now making clandestine flights 
from Khartoum to airfields in the Balkans. The Islamic Relief Agency (IRSA) 
headquartered in Khartoum and controlled by NIF, had opened offices in Sarajevo, 
Zagreb, Tirana, Tuzla, and Germany. The IRSA office in Zagreb was particularly active 
supplying weapons to the Bosniak army. The Sudanese opposition, the National 
Democratic Alliance (NDA), active in the UK, published Sudan government documents 
to embarrass Bashir and NIF which proved that Khartoum was a major conduit for the 
flow of arms from Afghanistan to Bosnia. Regular Boeing 707 cargo flights loaded with 
weapons from Afghanistan were arriving at Khartoum airport in August 1993, the same 
month the US Department of State added the Sudan to its list of countries involved in 
state-sponsored terrorism. [285] Reporters discovered that the name "Osama" was listed 
on the flight log. It was, of course, a curious coincidence that the reclusive Osama bin 
Laden was a resident in Khartoum surrounded by scores of Afghan-Arabs. The flight 
documents also revealed that the arms destined for Bosnia followed a secret meeting in 
June at Tehran between the intelligence services of Iran and the Sudan and several 
militant Islamist organizations.[286J The flight documents had been endorsed by Dr. 
Mustafa Osman Isma'il, a NIF stalwart, former Minister of State, Turabi disciple, and the 
Secretary-General of the Council for International People's Friendship (CIPF). Created 
by Sudan's President Ja'far al-Numayri in 1980, CIPF was supposed to foster political 
and cultural ties with the Islamic world, and it seemed an innocuous organization of no 
particular international standing. When President Bashir announced in 1993 that all 
foreign aid from institutions, foundations, and Islamic charities in the Sudan had to be 
approved by the CIPF office, the Council generously "extended brotherly financial aid to 
the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, the Bosnia Muslims, Somalia" and other countries 
"facing severe difficulties. " 12871 While CIPF appeared to work openly, it obviously 
supported covert projects involving every major Sudanese charity in Bosnia. 

In the secret world of Sudanese charities it is difficult to judge the impact of their 
efforts to help the Bosniaks. The controversial Yossef Bodansky, Director of Research 
of the International Strategic Studies Association and Director of the Task Force on 
Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the House of Representatives, was convinced 
it was in the Sudan that the use of indiscriminate violence in defense of the umma, the 
Muslim peoples, became the foundation of the Islamist movement. A fatwa issued at a 
conference held in El Obeid in the Kordofan province of the Sudan in April 1993 served 
as the "precedent-setting text for legislating relations between Muslims and non-Muslims 
in areas where the infidels" were unwilling to accept subjugation "by the Muslim 
forces. " [2881 Although the labia originally appeared to have been a product of the war in 
the southern Sudan, it was used to give legitimacy for Sudanese and Al Qaeda support 
for the Bosniaks and the murder of Serbian civilians, and later appears as the 
justification for jihadists' acts of terror in Algeria, Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir, 
Tajikistan, and the Philippines 



Third World Relief Agency 



In June 1994 the Austrian government invited President Bashir and Mahdi Ibrahim, 
confidant of Hasan al-Turabi and head of the all-important Political Department of the 
Sudan Foreign Ministry, and President Museveni of Uganda to Vienna in the hope that 
the Sudanese and Ugandan leaders could, perhaps, resolve their hostile relationship 
Despite the benevolent mediation of Austria, nothing came of this initiative. Bashir, 
however, did use the visit to meet with "members of the Sudanese community" whose 
large numbers came as a complete surprise to the Austrians.[289] Among the Sudanese 
who met with Bashir and the Sudanese delegation was a mysterious "diplomat," al-Fatih 
Ali Hassanein. Hassanein was a devout Muslim and, as a medical student at the 
Belgrade School of Medicine in the 1970s, had met Alija Izetbegovic. He had stood by 
him during his 1983 trial in Sarajevo for fostering Muslim nationalism. In 1987 he had 
founded, with his brother, Sukarno Hassanein, the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), 
an Islamic charity with headquarters in Vienna. 

TWRA eventually became the principal humanitarian front for moving arms to Bosnia. 
After the Bosnian declaration of independence in March 1992 President Izetbegovic 
had contacted his old friend through the Zagreb Mufti, Hassan Cengic. Hassenein was 
urged "to collect funds" for Bosnia from Muslim countries. When he agreed to facilitate 
the purchase of arms and launder money, President Izetbegovic guaranteed 
Hassanein's credentials with the Erste Bank Osterreich (First Austrian Bank). TWRA 
was soon transformed from an obscure NGO into a major relief agency involved in 
warehousing and transporting arms; "AK-47 rifles and missiles were shipped to Bosnia 
in containers marked as humanitarian aid. " [2901 Hassanein worked closely with the 
Bosniak security organization, the Agency for Information and Documentation; as a 
stalwart follower of Hasan al-Turabi and a member of NIF he was able to maintain 
contact from Europe with Turabi, Bin Laden, and Shaykh Omar Abd al-Rahman in New 
York. Among other activities TWRA became the agent for Shaykh Omar to market his 
videotapes and sermons in mosques around Europe. Hassanein also opened small 
offices in Budapest, Moscow, and Istanbul, and to give his charitable front some 
credibility he sponsored innocuous projects in the Balkans such as a chicken farm and 
a women's sewing center. At the same time Hassanein had become heavily committed 
to the illegal arms trade. He obtained a Sudanese diplomatic passport, probably through 
the intervention of Hasan al-Turabi, that allowed him "to transport large amounts of cash 
through Austria and into Croatia and Slovenia without being subjected to police checks." 
If nothing else these activities were in violation of the Vienna Convention governing 
diplomatic missions. [2911 

The inner circle that surrounded President Izetbegovic, including "former Zagreb Imam 
Deputy Defense Minister Hasan Cengic, the Cengic clan, and the Austrian citizen 
Dieter Hofmann," used "the Third World Relief Agency as a conduit for funds and 
supplies from the Islamic world, principally Iran ... to encourage the rebirth of Islam in 
Eastern Europe and the then Soviet Union. " [2921 Included among the members of the 
TWRA board of directors was Hassan Cengic, an Islamic cleric and the Mufti of Zagreb 
who, having lived in Tehran, negotiated the acquisition and shipments of arms from Iran 
to Bosnia, and was known as the "godfather" to Afghan-Arab mujahideen. Irfan 
Ljevakovic, a founder of Izetbegovic's Party of Democratic Action, and Huso Zivalj, 
Bosnian Ambassador to Austria between 1992 and 1995, were also involved in 
numerous questionable transactions by TWRA, including the delivery in 1993 of a 
Bosnian passport to Osama bin Laden. Zivalj personally used the embassy to assist the 



"Zima 94-95" (Winter 94-95) TWRA fundraising campaign. 

By 1993 TWRA accounts had been opened in Liechtenstein and Monaco to launder 
money. Some $80 million was remitted on a Vienna account in the First Austrian Bank 
in 1992 and $231 million the following year. Substantial sums were "spent on corrupting 
Croatian authorities" after Bosnia's Croatian nationalists initiated their own struggle 
against the Muslim government in Sarajevo. In 1994 and 1995 some $39 million from 
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Pakistan, Brunei, Malaysia, and Turkey passed through 
TWRA accounts and a "large portion of money was used for the purchase of the 
weapons for Bosnian Moslems. "[293] Hassanein continued to operate despite having to 
surrender his Sudanese diplomatic passport in 1993. He moved to Istanbul in 1994 to 
escape an Austrian investigation of TWRA money-laundering, and then received a gold 
medal from the Bosnian government in Sarajevo for his "humanitarian" efforts. [2941 In 
Istanbul Hassanein had played host to President Izetbegovic during his private visit to 
Turkey and "organized several encounters between Izetbegovic and Sudanese 
officials." [295] By 1994 TWRA had laundered more than $300 million to Sarajevo for the 
"purchase of arms for Bosnia," and to "cover the expenses of the international tours of 
the Bosnian Moslem politicians and their propaganda campaigns. " [2961 

By the autumn of 1993 western intelligence agencies were well aware of Hassanein's 
activities. Still, the USA took no action either to publicize or block TWRA fundraising or 
arms purchases. Critics of the Clinton administration would later argue that Hassanein 
must have received the blessing of its National Security Council (NSC), for there was 
considerable sympathy for the plight of Bosnian Muslims in the USA, where a host of 
charities for the relief of Bosnia had sprouted like mushrooms. [2971 Others charged that 
the arms transfers had helped "turn Bosnia into [a] Militant Islamic Base, in violation of 
the arms embargo initially demanded by the US and behind the back of its European 
allies Clinton had approved Iranian arms to Bosnia. " [2981 Ironically, the USA continued 
to turn a blind eye to Balkans arms trafficking and the role the Sudan played despite the 
fact that in August 1993 the State Department had added Sudan to its list of nations 
involved in state-sponsored terrorism. Eventually, a senior western diplomat familiar with 
the Balkans claimed that the Clinton administration knew what TWRA was up to in 
Bosnia but "took no action to stop its fund-raising or arms purchases, in large part 
because of the administration's sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence 
about maintaining the arms embargo. " [2991 

As late as April 1995 the Clinton administration was apparently unaware of the 
meetings of Egyptian terrorists held in Khartoum to plan an increase in the combat 
readiness of mujahideen operating in the Balkans. EIJ was already active in Albania, 
but the organization, hard-pressed for funds, had urged Ayman al-Zawahiri to visit the 
USA on a fundraising mission. Certainly, Zawahiri was welcome in America where a 
score of charities, such as Al-Nasr International (Worth, Illinois), were collecting cash 
for the American Bosnia-Herzegovina Relief Fund. Al-Nasr maintained offices in San 
Carlos, California, Saddle Brook, New Jersey, and Falls Church, Virginia, and worked 
directly with the Mission of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations. [3001 As the 
war in Bosnia was coming to its dismal conclusion in September 1995, the Austrian 
police finally raided the headquarters of TWRA in Vienna to discover a treasure-trove of 
documents. When asked why it took so long to close a bogus charity, Austrian officials 
claimed they could not end the TWRA charade because it was not illegal to negotiate a 
weapons deal on Austrian soil so long as the transfers took place elsewhere. The TWRA 
ledgers, however, gave a full accounting of the transfer of huge sums for arms 



trafficking through the First Austrian Bank. 

Although officially shut down by the police, TWRA continued to operate for some 
months, transferring arms and repatriating Bosniak refugees from Macedonia and 
Kosovar refugees from Bosnia to Kosovo until 1996.13011 Hassanein had countless 
contacts in the Islamic world, and in the latter months of the conflict in Bosnia served as 
intermediary with the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH, aka Foundation for 
Human Rights and Freedom), founded in Istanbul in 1995 specifically to provide support 
for the Bosniaks. IHH raised immediate suspicions among the Turkish authorities, and 
was eventually closed for a time in 1998 after investigators found bombs in its Turkish 
office and again in August 1999 when funds for Turkish earthquake victims were found 
to be missing. As with TWRA the USA labeled IHH as nothing more than a "cover-up" 
organization to forge documents for "infiltration" by mujahideen. \Z02\ 



Aftermath in Bosnia 

When the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in 1995 all "foreign soldiers" were 
required to leave Bosnia. Some mujahideen did Others did not, and in the summer of 
1995 there were an estimated 3,000 Muslim mujahideen who had fought either with the 
Bosniak army or as separate units. Among those who stayed behind were a hundred 
mujahideen of the Seventh Muslim Brigade, mostly Algerians who had occupied the 
former Serbian village of Bocinja Donja, sixty miles north of Sarajevo, near the city of 
Zenica in central Bosnia. [3031 Algerian Afghan-Arabs and Kamar Kharban, leader of 
the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, were seen in Bosnia on various ceremonial 
occasions. The Bosniak government bestowed "Bosnian citizenship to several hundred 
Arab and other Islamist volunteers," eliminating their "foreign" status before the Dayton 
Accords took affect in 1995, and in the early months of 1996 there was still a large 
number of mujahideen in the Balkans where the influence of Iran had already been 
"detected behind the wave of new Islamic schools which have sprung up across central 
Bosnia. " [3041 When nine Iranians were arrested in Zagreb in February, Nicholas 
Burns, spokesman for the Department of State, warned that the continued presence of 
some 300 "foreign fighters" in Bosnia threatened future military assistance approved by 
the Dayton Accords. [3051 

In Bosnia over a million people were dead, wounded, or living abroad in refugee 
camps. The government was weak, impoverished, and decentralized, needing massive 
assistance from the international community and its humanitarian agencies: yet TWRA, 
having accomplished its task, ignored all appeals for help, closed its offices, and 
departed, leaving the legitimate Islamic charities, particularly charities from the Gulf, to 
provide hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. The Party of Democratic Action of 
President Alija Izetbegovic continued to receive funds directly from Saudi Arabia and 
the Gulf States. Additional assistance came from a half-dozen major Islamic charities 
that had previously backed the President and the mujahideen. In autumn 1996 these 
Saudi charities were hard at work assisting Muslim refugees to return to Bosnia, and the 
Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia (SHCB), also founded by Saudi Prince 
Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, was spending millions repatriating over 100,000 Bosnian 
refugees from Turkey, Croatia, Macedonia, and Slovenia back to Bosnia. [3061 

Of the 250 NGOs active in the Balkans in 1996, fifty were Islamic; thirty of these were 



known to have terrorist connections but were ignored by the new multi-ethnic national 
police force. Among the most active of those thirty was the Kuwait Joint Relief 
Committee (General Committee for Refugee Assistance) whose office in Zagreb was 
headed by Shaykh Abu Adil Uthman al-Haydar, a known Muslim Brother and HAMAS 
agent. The Iranian Red Crescent Society (aka Helal Ahmar) and the Iranian 
Humanitarian Aid Organization, with offices in Sarajevo, Split, Tuzla, and Zenica, had 
previously moved arms to the mujahideen and continued to do so. IBC had offices in 
Zenica and Zagreb, as did MAK in Zagreb and Sarajevo and the Al Haramain 
Foundation in Zagreb, Rijeka, and Belikoj Gorici, Albania. All assisted the mujahideen. 
Zenica was also the headquarters of the Egyptian Jama'at al-lslamiyya (EIJ), whose 
leaders used UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) credentials to move freely 
throughout the Balkans. The mujahideen who remained in Bosnia after the war years 
(1992-1995) were no less committed to continue the jihad, and from their relative 
obscurity they began to discuss and plot the Islamist penetration of Europe and 
America. They "wanted to use Bosnia as a logistical base . . . and tried to radicalize the 
Muslim population," but their call to arms made little impression upon the Bosniaks who 
were exhausted by war, and were too secular, or accustomed to "a tolerant form of 
Islam that abhors terrorism and fundamentalism. " [3071 

Although TWRA would disappear other charities remained, including the Bosnia 
branch of BIF (aka Bosanska Idealna Futura), which supplied the travel documents 
permitting Mamdouh Salim, a "key bin Laden associate" charged as an accomplice in 
the bombing of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, to travel to Bosnia in 1998 with 
all expenses paid. [3081 Two years later the Bosnian office of "Mothers of Srebrenica 
and Podrinje" sent a letter to Prince Salman of Saudi Arabia, asserting that the Director 
of the Sarajevo office of SHRC that coordinated the work of Islamic charities in Bosnia 
had diverted $100 million collected specifically for the relatives of the victims of the 
slaughter of Muslims after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995. The financial police of the 
Bosnian Ministry of Finance then searched the SHRC office and uncovered documents 
that demonstrated without any doubt that it was "clearly a front for radical and 
terrorism-related activities. " [3091 

In 1998 French troops serving in Bosnia began to suppress the activities of the 
mujahideen. Islamic charities were raided, Afghan-Arabs arrested, and Iranian 
diplomats expelled. The French intervention brought to a halt the regular shipments of 
C-4 plastique from Bosnia to EIJ cells in Europe and disrupted plans to harass US and 
European troops in Bosnia and Albania. Again many mujahideen were on the move, 
silently slipping out of Bosnia. In December 1999 Ahmet Ressemi, an Afghan-Arab 
Algerian national who had fought in the Al Muwafaq Brigade and who was in contact 
with Al Qaeda cells in Bosnia and Germany, was arrested at the Canada-USA border 
while driving a carload of explosives and bomb-making materiel meant for an attack on 
the Los Angeles airport. In April 2000 troops of the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 
raided a house rented by the SARCS in Pristina to discover it was an Al Qaeda safe 
haven paid for by former directors of the Red Crescent including a founder of Al 
Qaeda, Wael Julaidan, who at the time was the Secretary-General of the Rabita Trust in 
Pakistan. In July that year three Egyptian Afghan-Arabs with close ties to Osama bin 
Laden were arrested in Sarajevo by the Bosniak Muslim-Croat Federation police. They 
had fought with the Bosniak mujahideen and like many others had been able to obtain 
Bosnian citizenship - either as a reward for their services in the Bosniak army, where 
they were generally used as instructors, or by marriage to Bosnian women. 



In 2000 a highly classified State Department report warned that the Muslim-controlled 
portions of Bosnia had become a safe haven and "staging area" for Islamist terrorists 
protected by the Muslim government of Izetbegovic, but after the investigations into the 
activities of BIF in Chicago following 9/11 there was no longer any doubt that, following 
the Dayton Accords, Islamists had found a home in Bosnia from which to plan and 
execute terrorist plots. The discovery in the BIF office in Sarajevo in March 2002 of the 
"Golden Chain" list with the names of wealthy Saudi sponsors appeared to confirm that 
Al Qaeda was alive and well in the Balkans. These suspicions resulted in the Bosnian 
Ministry of Internal Affairs closing the Bosnian offices of three Islamic charities: BIF, 
the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), and the Al Haramain Foundation. 



Albanian imbroglio 

During the forty-six years of xenophobic communist rule (1944-1990) Albanian 
Muslims, who comprised 70 percent of the population, were at best restricted in their 
observation of the rituals of Islam and at worst persecuted. By the 1990s some had 
abandoned Islam, and many had simply let the practice of their religion lapse, to the 
dismay of the Islamists. They were determined to restore Islam in Albania on Islamist 
principles, and in 1990 "a number of Islamic groups" began to visit Albania. 
Proselytizers from the Gulf, Turkey, and Iran soon followed in greater numbers to revive 
the religious enthusiasm of lapsed Albanian Muslims An "aid scheme" was agreed to 
with Turkey. In Tetovo Saudi Arabia funded the construction of a large madrasa, and 
Saudi charities shipped more than half a million copies of the Quran to Albania. Kuwait 
offered badly needed economic aid, but on condition that it could construct several 
mosques. [310] Iran was also a major donor, and in Scutari (Skadar), a famed Albanian 
town, Iranian agents opened the Ayatollah Khomeini Society; at Prizren, a city in 
Kosovo close to the Albanian border, Iranians founded a society funded by the Iranian 
Culture Center in Belgrade and selected groups of Albanians to receive scholarships for 
the study of theology in Iran. 

After the elections in March 1992 installed a democratic government to replace the last 
of the doctrinaire communists, the impoverished government of Albania, in conjunction 
with the Islamic Development Bank of Jidda, invited a Saudi delegation to a conference 
to plan and organize economic assistance for Albania. The Netherlands Alislamic Aluok 
Foundation, IDB, and ISRA all offered economic assistance. In 1993 the largest charity 
operating in Albania was the Islamic Charity Project International, an association of 
more than a dozen Islamic charities including the Muwafaq Foundation and the 
Ayatollah Khomeini Society of Iran. The Islamic Relief Organization sponsored a 
medical clinic, and the Eastern European Muslim Youth worked in coordination with 
WAMY. By 1994 officials in several western European countries had become "deeply 
suspicious of [President Sali) Berisha's motives, fearing that Albania could become 
Islam's advance-post in Europe," yet ironically the Muslim President enthusiastically 
supported the efforts of the CIA to reorganize the inchoate Albanian intelligence service 
(SHIK). [311] Thereafter, CIA agents working with SHIK monitored the activities of 
Muslim charities and Islamist militants from Tirana. They would check travel plans, 
phone calls, "and contacts of various charity workers with suspected links to extremist 
groups from Egypt, Algeria, and other countries." Among the first of the mujahideen 
they spotted in 1992 was Mohammed al- Zawahiri, an employee of IIRO and the 



younger brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri. He had taken command of the terrorist cells in 
Albania and found jobs for the members of EJI who were attracted to Albania by "the 
availability of paying jobs with the Muslim charities. " [31 21 

Zawahin immediately hired Mohammed Hassan Tita who arrived in Tirana in January 
1993 to work for IIRO, "to find the jihadists jobs in Islamic charities," and collect "zakat 
amounting to twenty percent of the salary from the Jihad members. "[313] Zawahiri 
subsequently organized his own cell with more than twenty mujahideen including the El J 
Afghan-Arab Mohamed Ahmed Salama Mabrouk, a jihadist who had served seven years 
in jail for his part in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Mabrouk had 
been sentenced to death in absentia for his role in a plot to blow up Cairo's Khan 
al-Khalili bazaar in 1995. He directed the Saudi Center for Research and Revival of 
Islamic Heritage funded by smaller Saudi and Turkish charities. [3141 

While at IIRO, Tita's most important hire, perhaps, was Shawki Salama Attiya, a forger 
who in the early 1990s had been an instructor at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and 
now worked for the Islamic Heritage orphanage in Albania. He arrived from the Sudan in 
August 1995 within days of the attempted assassination of President Mubarak in Addis 
Ababa. His job at the orphanage paid him $700 a month, a fortune in Albania or 
elsewhere in the Middle East, and was but one example why the fiscal fortunes of EIJ 
had become precarious. During a meeting of EIJ leaders in Sanaa, Yemen, in 
December 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri reported on his visit to California to solicit funds for 
EIJ in Albania. Zawahiri was a noted fundraiser, but he failed to find any wealthy 
patrons, especially after EIJ was implicated in the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in 
Pakistan and the failed assassination in Ethiopia of Egyptian President Mubarak. 
Following the October 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad the 
Pakistan security forces moved rapidly to expel Arab-Afghans from their bases in 
Pakistan. This action placed intense funding demands on the Afghan Support 
Committee and the Al Kifah Refugee Center, as hundreds of mujahideen were shipped 
off to Bosnia. At Sanaa Zawahiri delivered discouraging news. EIJ was nearly broke. 
According to Ahmed Ibrahim al-Naggar, who attended the meeting, Zawahiri had said, 
"These are bad times." A month after the conclave EIJ outfitted Naggar with a plane 
ticket, laptop computer, and $500 to join Tita, Mabrouk, and Attiya in Tirana. There this 
trained pharmacist from a Cairo slum found a job with the Al Haramain Foundation, the 
Saudi charity that operated out of a three-story villa in the center of Albania's 
dilapidated capital. Zawahiri and the cash-starved EIJ worked quietly and without much 
success until "Iranian and Saudi representatives opened foundations to provide 
patronage," and an Islamic bank opened in Tirana. [3151 

Toward the end of the Bosnian war IIRO identity cards (ingatha) were found on 
mujahideen killed inside Bosnia, convincing evidence that a functioning jihadist cell was 
in Albania. Next the Macedonian government closed the IIRO office in Skopje in March 
1995, and its regional financial accountant, an Egyptian, was detained by Croatian 
police after a raid on the IIRO Zagreb office in April. Not only was EIJ the most active 
mujahideen organization in Albania, its members provided a safe haven for Al Qaeda. 
The Albanian newspaper Republica reported that Bin Laden himself carried an Albanian 
passport and was a majority stockholder and founder of the Arab-Albanian Bank located 
in the central square of Tirana. Al Qaeda recruited young Albanians by setting up soup 
kitchens and providing medical supplies, all in the name of Bin Laden, who was cast in 
the role of the "Benevolent Arab." The recruits were first given military training 
in-country, and the good prospects were then sent for "further instruction in Islamic law 



and religion in Saudi Arabia. " [31 61 Although the extent to which radical Islam has been 
imposed in a region formerly dominated by communist governments remains unclear, 
there are certainly Islamist organizations now entrenched in virtually all Balkan countries 
where there were none before the Saudis became involved. 

As early as 1993 employees of Human Concern International (HCI), with its 
headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, had close ties with Algerian and Egyptian Salafists. 
The office of its subsidiary in Albania, Human Relief International, was closed without 
comment by Albanian authorities in April 1995. The following year the Iranian 
Revolutionary Guards joined forces with Al Qaeda and EIJ to support the Albanian 
insurgency in Kosovo, and by 1997 their Albanian network was sending mujahideen, 
known in Kosovo as "muj," to train the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, Ushtria Clirimtare 
e Kosoves).[317] Although Albania was thrown into chaos early in 1997 after the 
collapse of a bizarre pyramid investment scheme that bankrupted thousands of 
Albanians and forced President Berisha out of office, the new government continued to 
support those CIA operations he had approved. From the phone taps agents learned 
that Al Qaeda and EIJ had merged, and Zawahiri's financial difficulties were resolved 
Thus, when the Albanian cell became an ever more active threat to the US presence, 
the CIA decided to terminate Al Qaeda operations in Albania in spring 1998. Although 
the government was skeptical "that the Muslim charity workers posed a serious threat," it 
could not prevail against the advice of its own security services, SHIK, the CIA, and the 
Egyptian government.[318] 

Five Egyptian members of the EIJ cell in Tirana, who worked ostensibly for the Islamic 
Revival Foundation of Kuwait, were arrested. Organized in 1992 and active from Britain 
to Bangladesh, the Foundation was based in Peshawar, and its funding was managed 
directly by Al Qaeda. According to the Tirana press "the Egyptian terrorists had 
infiltrated 'volunteers' as the Kuwait people themselves do not prefer to be employed in 
poor countries, like in Albania. " 131 91 The "US authorities considered the Tirana cell 
among the most dangerous terror outfits in Europe," and the CIA believed its tracking of 
the jihadists to be "one of the agency's great successes. " [3201 Nevertheless, the demise 
of EIJ did not end Islamist activity in Albania. In 2002 Albanian authorities seized the 
fifteen-story twin towers under construction in the heart of Tirana by the Karavan 
Construction Company owned by the ubiquitous Yassin al-Qadi. Al-Qadi had been 
active in Albania since the arrival of the Muwafaq charity and had been suspected of 
laundering some $10 million in support of Al Qaeda. Other Islamic religious charities 
came under investigation by SHIK for "illegal operations." Teams specializing in 
money-laundering pursued new cases, and Prime Minister llir Meta reported: "We 
identified the financial entities active in our country that are financially linked to the 
Al-Qaeda network." [321l In October 2002 a list was sent by the USA to the Albanian 
government urging the closure of the Active Islamic Youth, Al Haramain, Al Furkan, and 
SHRC offices in Albania. In the end, Saudi charities found that to broadcast the seeds 
of Salafist Islam on rocky ground was a bootless task. [3221 



War in Kosovo 

Kosovo, an international protectorate administered by the United Nations, remained 
part of Serbia and Montenegro, but its legal authority resided with the UN Interim 
Mission for Kosovo (UNMIK). The Kosovo Force (KFOR) - the NATO police force - and 



UNMIK were unable to halt the destruction of Christian churches, the region's 
widespread narcotics trafficking, and the infiltration of radical Islamists, many of whom 
were involved in mosque construction. In 1989, when President Slobodan Milosevic 
abolished the autonomous status of Kosovo and imposed direct rule from Belgrade, Dr. 
Ibrahim Rugova founded the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), the first 
non-communist party in the province. At first the LDK sought recognition for Kosovo as 
a full Yugoslav republic However, upon the disintegration of the Federal Republic of 
Yugoslavia Rugova declared the independence of Kosovo in 1993. It was an 
independence no one recognized. [3231 Some Muslim Albanian Kosovars - who 
numbered 1.7 million, against 200,000 Christian Serbs - argued that they should 
emulate the Muslim Croats and Bosniaks and go to war. President Rugova believed this 
would be a terrible mistake that could only result, as in Croatia and Bosnia, in the 
massive flight of tens of thousands of Muslim Kosovar refugees into Albania. Instead, 
Rugova and the other political parties representing the Serbs established parallel 
structures of government, health care, and education. This unique experiment appeared 
to work, for the Serbs preferred the popular and pacifist Rugova to the hardliners among 
the Albanian Kosovars. Unfortunately, after the signing of the Dayton Accords in 1995, 
the Albanians were shocked to learn that Kosovo had been ignored in the settlement, 
and any expectation they may have had that the West would recognize their 
independence quickly vanished. When Rugova's popularity began to sag and his 
pacifism was denounced as passivity, the clandestine Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army 
(KLA: Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, UCK) decided in 1996 to achieve by arms in 
Kosovo what the Bosniaks could claim they had won at Dayton. 

Founded in the early 1990s, the KLA first killed individual Serbs and their Albanian 
collaborators, and then, emboldened, they attacked Serbian police stations and army 
units, capturing large quantities of arms Albanian emigres in Europe and the USA 
opened their checkbooks to supplement funds raised by smuggling and drug-running. 
Ibrahim Rugova condemned the actions of KLA, but refused to denounce them as 
terrorists as demanded by the USA. The media portrayed KLA as a liberation movement 
to free Albanian Kosovars from the tyranny of Slobodan Milosevic. Unfortunately, like 
other militia movements in the Balkans KLA's program was ethnic separatism - driving 
the Serbs, Macedonians, and other ethnic minorities from Kosovo. Beginning as a 
small, uncoordinated guerrilla group, by 1999 KLA had evolved into a substantial fighting 
force of 50,000 men equipped with some sophisticated weaponry captured from the 
Serbs or looted from armories in Albania during the civil war that erupted after the fall of 
President Sali Berisha. KLA soon received support from the USA whose Secretary of 
State, Madeleine Albright, intervened to see that its leader, Hashim Thaci, and not 
Rugova appeared as the head of the Kosovar delegation at the negotiations held in 
Rambouillet in February and March 1999. That meeting resulted in a US and NATO 
decision to intervene militarily in Kosovo, first clandestinely and then directly with 
money, arms, and training. As early as May 1998, NATO began to strengthen its military 
capabilities in Albania and Macedonia, and by October the USA was prepared for direct 
intervention. By then KLA had control of a third of Kosovo. On 15 January 1999 the 
supposed "Serb massacre" of the inhabitants of the village of Racak provoked both the 
USA and NATO to impose demands upon Milosevic, and, when he refused to accept 
them, NATO launched its seventy-nine days of bombing from 24 March to 10 June 
1999. Within a week 300,000 Albanian Kosovars had fled across the borders into 
Albania and Macedonia, and by June 850,000 Kosovars, overwhelmingly Muslim 
Albanian refugees and IDPs, had fled their homes and villages. 



Islamic charities from Saudi Arabia were the first to respond. They had arrived in 
Tirana in December 1998, and had soon been joined by aid agencies from Kuwait and 
UAE. In fact, refugees fleeing from fighting between KLA and Serb security forces had 
begun to trickle into Albania as early as May 1998. They were cared for by the Islamic 
Coordinating Council (ICC), which oversaw the work of some twenty Islamic relief 
groups operating in Albania. As the river of refugees rose in flood SHRC was authorized 
by royal decree in April 1999 to create a separate Saudi Joint Relief Committee for 
Kosovo and Chechnya (SJRC - Kosovo and Chechnya). It would coordinate the 
operations of the seven Saudi relief organizations for Kosovo and Chechnya that had 
previously been active in Bosnia. SJRC - Kosovo and Chechnya maintained a bank 
account at NCB which was managed personally by Suleiman Abd al-Aziz al-Rajhi. 
Within five months SHRC had received $45.5 million in cash, services, and supplies. 
The Kuwaiti and Saudi charities devoted their resources to assisting refugees, while 
charities from the Gulf states concentrated their efforts on the repair and reconstruction 
of some 200 of the 600 mosques and madrasas in Kosovo that had been badly 
damaged or destroyed by Serbian militias. New mosques were constructed with "a zeal 
that has often come at the expense of the mosques' historic character, or of the 
mosques in their entirety" but that represented, however, a considerable infusion of 
cash into an impoverished region. [324] 

Islamic charities from the Arab countries soon found themselves embroiled in the 
internal differences between the Kosovo Muslims and the mujahideen as to the concept 
of jihad. Muslim Kosovars were unconventionally Sufi, and when Arab Sunni volunteers 
"tried to similarly graft their concept of jihad to the KLA struggle" against the Serbs, they 
failed. [3251 Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Al Qaeda. and mujahideen 
from at least half a dozen Middle Eastern countries were now crossing into Kosovo from 
bases in Albania to infiltrate the KLA. Alerted by the CIA-Albanian intelligence 
operations the USA, which had guaranteed the safety of Albanian Muslim Kosovars, met 
in Geneva with the leaders of KLA to insist they reject the jihadists. KLA eventually 
agreed, to the anger and disbelief of some of the Islamic charities in Kosovo. One of 
them complained: "The moderate Kosovar Albanians expelled or betrayed Arab militants 
who came to Kosovo with the aim of Islamizing ethnic conflicts. "[326] Members of the 
militant Finsbury Park Mosque in London "bitterly recalled the betrayal" of mujahideen 
they had sent to Kosovo. 

SHRC, however, was not easily discouraged, and persisted in opening madrasas, 
closing Sufi shrines, and creating separate schools for boys and girls. It occupied a 
building in Pristina sufficiently large to be used as a prayer hall, and continued its role 
as the umbrella organization representing several Saudi charities. It would spend "over 
$100 million on caring for and resettling refugees, on rebuilding schools and houses, 
and on health care" during its four years. [327] The Saudis built mosques in Rahovec, 
Peja, and Gjakova, all handsome stone structures in the Wahhabi architectural tradition, 
which stressed simplicity in distinction to the historically ornate Balkan mosques, until 
the Department of Culture of UNMIK intervened to halt construction of the Gjakova 
mosque, insisting that the Saudis would have to conform more to the Balkan traditional 
architecture with mosques built with local materials and historically appropriate designs. 
The Saudis also angered the Muslim Kosovars by the destruction of tombstones, 
graveyards, and monuments to Islamic saints in Vushtrri, Peja, and Gjakova that were 
anathema to Wahhabi beliefs. The Islamic community of Kosovo, established in 1912, 
should have prevented the desecration but remained aloof, more interested in the Saudi 



money pouring into the community than in architectural style, but the Wahhabi activities 
became so egregious that the Mufti of Kosovo requested SHRC either reduce its 
presence in Kosovo or leave. 

Charities from UAE in Vishtrri in north-central Kosovo also tended to be immune to 
local sensitivities. The Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Charitable and Humanitarian 
Foundation had restored mosques, built a hospital, and refurbished over 1,200 damaged 
houses, but the 1993 construction of a new Islamic cultural center in the heart of 
Vushtrri offended the residents. The center did not "allude in any way to the 
15th-century mosque that once stood on the site," and locals argued that the charity 
was "trying to promote religion" while the population at large was "eager to distance itself 
from anything that smells of 'fundamentalism. "' [3281 In 1999 the Zubayr Philanthropic 
Foundation, an unknown Sudanese philanthropic organization, began sending 
planeloads of food, blankets, and medicine to Muslims in Kosovo, and a Sudanese 
Financial Committee for Supporting the Kosovo Muslims collected money for da\ia in 
Kosovo. [3291 It was just one of the many charities collecting funds, but its concern for 
Kosovo was somewhat perverse when there were hundreds of thousands of 
poverty-stricken Sudanese who were desperate for the assistance Islamic charities 
could provide. 



After 9/11 

The effort to mobilize Muslim charities in the USA to support the incipient jihad in the 
Balkans began after Suliman al-Ali, who had lived in the USA, joined IIRO, and 
personally solicited over $500,000 during his first year in Saudi Arabia as an IIRO 
fundraiser. Impressed by his abilities to raise money, in 1991 "the Saudis sent al-Ali 
back to the United States to open IIRO's official office in the Washington DC 
area. " [3301 His arrival coincided with a realignment of "the Saudi-relief infrastructure" 
from Afghanistan to Eastern Europe and the Balkans for jihad. The Al Kifah Refugee 
Center in New York, which had previously raised funds for use in Afghanistan, now 
devoted its energy to humanitarian operations in Bosnia. Suliman al-Ali did the same, 
and in the years that followed he tunneled untold millions through his charity to support 
Bosniak and Albanian Muslims. In addition, al-Ali completed some unusual money 
transfers to Mercy International Canada, a branch of Mercy International (originally 
HCI). Other transfers were made to an Islamic charity based in Michigan, and to a 
Chicago chemical company run by a director of Mercy International. Throughout the 
1990s US authorities did little or nothing to impede the flow of donations from Muslim 
charities in America to the Balkans, but these sums were by no means comparable to 
those sent from Saudi Arabia to Bosnia. 

In June 2000 Alija Izetbegovic stepped down after ten years as President of Bosnia 
He declared that his reason for leaving was the determination by the international 
community to dilute the Islamic essence of Bosnia that to him was its reward to the 
Serbians for ethnic cleansing. "The international community is pushing things forward in 
Bosnia ... but it is doing it at the expense of the Muslim people. I feel it is an 
injustice . . . These are things that I cannot live with. " [3311 The change of government in 
Sarajevo did, indeed, lead to the investigation of Islamic charities by Bosnian Financial 
Police. Accompanied by agents from NATO, they soon discovered accounts that had 



been used for illegal activities in the Balkans. Most surprising, anomalies were found in 
the Sarajevo office of SHRC for aid to Bosnia. An audit undertaken in October 2001 
found unaccountable cash on hand, suspicious money transfers through personal bank 
accounts, and little or no accounting of money spent. Moreover, the Bosnian and NATO 
investigators uncovered a wealth of information on past and present terrorist activists in 
Bosnia and incriminating evidence, including photographs of the World Trade Center, 
the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole. There were maps of 
government buildings in Washington and instruments to forge State Department 
identification badges. After the raids had "revealed inappropriate materials that appear 
to indicate terrorist activity," including a "plot" against the US embassy in Sarajevo and 
apparent "planning materials for terrorist strikes throughout Europe, Bosnian officials 
threatened to close SHRC, one of the largest Islamic charities in the world. " 13321 

Early in 2002 Bosnian police raided the BIF (Bosanska Idealna Futura, aka Bosnian 
Ideal Future) offices in Sarajevo and Zenica, where they seized weapons and 
instructions on how to make bombs, booby-traps, and forge bogus passports. BIF was a 
safe haven and an integral part of the Al Qaeda money-laundering network. When the 
very next day a bomb threat was received by the US embassy in Sarajevo, the Bosnian 
police quickly arrested Munib Zahiragic, a Bosniak, and charged him with espionage. 
Zahiragic was a former member of the Bosnian Muslim secret police from 1996 to 2000, 
after which he had been appointed director of BIF in Sarajevo. He had in his 
possession more than a hundred secret files on Middle East and African mujahideen 
who had escaped arrest and were still in Bosnia. As a result police were able to arrest 
twelve members of a Bosnian Al Qaeda cell including six naturalized Bosnians, five 
Algerians, and a Yemeni, all of whom worked for Islamic charities and who were 
planning to bomb the US embassy and other government buildings in Sarajevo. One 
member was in direct telephone contact with Osama bin Laden, another had numerous 
blank western passports at his home in Zenica, and a third was the administrator at 
SHCB, a "$9 million complex, which includes a mosque that can accommodate 5,000 
people." l3331 

In possession of this incriminating evidence the Bosnian Financial Police immediately 
launched investigations into several foreign Islamic charities that implicated employees 
and officials of SHCB, BIF, the Al Haramain Foundation, Human Appeals International, 
and IIRO in illegal activities. When the Bosnian police raided the Al Haramain 
headquarters in March 2002, its officials had already destroyed its financial records for 
1994-1998, but those for 1999-2001 recorded that $1.59 million had been withdrawn 
from its charity account and then vanished. The Director of the sister organization to Al 
Haramain, Al Haramainwa wa al-Masjed al-Aqsa Charity Foundation, could not explain 
how the charity had spent $3.5 million in 1999, the year its Director was in contact with 
Al Qaeda. Nor could it explain the transfer of funds to Yassin al-Qadi and Wael 
Julaidan, both on the US list of designated terrorists. The BIF and Al Haramain were 
closed, and the regional commander for NATO reported sententiously in July 2002: "We 
detected a pattern here ... for terrorist cells and those who aid and harbor them to 
operate behind the shield of legitimate humanitarian . . . organizations. They were 
preaching good, and sometimes doing good, while plotting evil. " 13341 



Chapter 7 Russia and the Central Asian Crescent 



Islamist movements are first of all about national liberation, not individual liberties; 
they are about power before politics: their populism is a form of mass mobilization, 
not participation. 

Hasan al-Turabi, quoted in Kramer, "The Mismeasure of Political Islam" 



The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, ironically, enabled revolutionary Islam, which 
had been anathema to communism, to establish Salafist radicalism in the now 
independent Soviet republics of Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan on the border with China in 
the east and Azerbaijan on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the west were the hinges 
of a giant door opening to expose the heartland of Central Asia to the Islamists. 
Historically, this region, which stretches in a great crescent more than 1,800 miles from 
east to west, had been the traditional frontier between the Russian heartland and the 
states and societies of the Asian steppe. It remains so to this day. In the west the volatile 
region of the Caucasus was inhabited by numerous ethnic groups with disparate cultural 
traditions, long histories of mutual animosity, and a veneer of Soviet communism. They 
were now open for Afghan-Arabs and Islamists to spread their jihadist message among 
Muslims of the former Soviet Chechen-Ingush Republic and ever northward into Russia. 
When the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, followed by the dissolution of 
the Soviet Union in 1991, the emerging Muslim states possessed their own unique blend 
of Islam characterized by many local beliefs and rituals that resulted in varying degrees 
of susceptibility to the invasion by Afghan-Arabs, Salafists, and Al Qaeda, all seeking to 
export the Islamist revolution. 

During the second PAIC conference, held at Khartoum in December 1993, the 
prominent Russian Islamist Geidar Jemal took the opportunity to discuss the problem of 
Muslims in Russia with Hasan al-Turabi. Turabi was a sympathetic listener, and publicly 
denounced the "traitorous policies" of Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who he 
said had produced a "huge tragedy for the Islamic world" by allowing the emergence of 
a world dominated by the USA. Turabi proposed that an Islamic committee for Russia 
should be established with Jemal as its chairman to make the committee "an organ 
representing the religo-political will" of Russian Muslims. [3351 Turabi had good reason to 
urge his fellow Islamist to action, for the Turks and Saudis had already sent 
proselytizing missions into Central Asia to consolidate and spread traditional Sunni 
Islam and Wahhabism. Turkey was as interested in cultivating its historical cultural and 
linguistic ties as it was in spreading Sunni Islam, for it had a linguistic affinity with the 
Azeri, Kazakh, Tatar, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uighur peoples; by 2000 there 
were more than 10,000 students from Central Asia studying in Turkey. 

Saudi Arabia regarded the demise of the Soviet Union as a unique opportunity to 
launch da\va and spread Wahhabi Islam among the Muslims of the new republics; after 
more than a half-century of communist rule, they had abandoned Islam or were 
perfunctory practitioners in the mosque with no sense of unity or ideological 
commitment. [3361 In the past Saudi Arabia had been excluded from any meaningful 
presence in the Soviet Union; it had been forced it to enlist the diplomatic, religious, and 



commercial channels of UAE, Kuwait, and Pakistan to further its diplomatic and Islamic 
objectives. With the demise of the USSR da\va became the mission of the employees of 
Saudi international Islamic NGOs whose activities were supervised by Prince Turki 
al-Faisal, head of the Saudi General Intelligence Service.[337] By the mid-1990s the 
various Saudi and Muslim agencies - WAMY, Rabita Trust, IIRO, the SAAR Foundation, 
and IDB - "regularly [made] contributions" to religious, educational, and public health 
programs in Central Asia. [3381 

During the Afghan war combatants from the various tribes of Central Asia and the 
mujahideen in Afghanistan had set aside their historical ethnic, linguistic, and religious 
differences, but once the Soviets departed those differences quickly reemerged in 
Afghanistan as the various Islamist warlords began to fight among themselves. The 
Hezb-i-lslami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar were supported by the Sunni Pushtuns of central 
and northern Afghanistan: Ahmad Shah Massoud's Jama'at-i-lslami was commanded by 
a Persian-speaking Sunni Tajik; the Hizb-i-Wahdat was led by Shi'ite Hazaras; the 
Jambesh-e-Melli of Abdul Rasnid Dostum were Uzbeks. And then there was the Taliban 
("student," an Urdu word derived from Arabic) movement, which practiced a strict 
Salafist Islam that was unacceptable, and even considered heretical, by many Afghans. 
Thus, the stage was set for internecine war. Elsewhere in Central Asia following the 
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 five independent states, the "Stans," were 
created - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Although 
Muslims were in the majority in each, they differed dramatically in character, history, 
and language from the Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa, and even from one 
another. Moreover, under communism Islam had been contained and persecuted for 
nearly seventy years by a determinedly atheistic communist regime. In the late 1920s 
severe restrictions had been placed on the Islamic community of Central Asia, and its 
Muslim leaders were carefully selected by the Soviets to enforce the will and regulations 
of the Russian government. Authorities forbade the collection of zakat, prohibited the 
hajj, closed mosques, and at one time Stalin even ordered the execution of any Muslim 
who owned a Quran The Soviets were confident that ethnic and religious differences 
were bound for extinction. 

From the Caspian Sea to China the Soviets had divided the Turkic-speaking Muslims 
into the Soviet Socialist Republics of Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Turkmenistan, and 
Kazakhstan. The border between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, however, was drawn in 
such a fashion as to divide Tajiks, who speak a language akin to Persian (Farsi). The 
Turkic-speaking people, ethnic Tatars, and Bashkirs each had their separate Tatar and 
Bashkir Autonomous Republics. The Soviet control of Islam was insured by four Islamic 
Spiritual Directorates, each led by a Soviet-approved Mufti. The first comprised Central 
Asia and Kazakhstan, with its seat in Tashkent; the second, at Ufa, incorporated 
European Russia and Siberia; the third controlled the Caucasus and Dagestan from 
Makhach-Qala; and the fourth administered the Muslims in the Transcaucasus from 
Baku. [339] Despite determined efforts by the Soviets to contain orthodox Islam in the 
expectation of its eventual demise, the Islamic religion had survived in these regional 
directorates as Muslims gravitated underground to the less visible Sufi brotherhoods 
(tariqa) with their secret rituals and self-proclaimed mullahs. In these brotherhoods the 
practice of Islam has, historically, acquired many idiosyncratic and syncretistic rituals - 
such as in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, where the worship of Muslim saints, shrines, 
and tombs, anathema to orthodox Islam, was sustained thanks to the surviving Sufi 
brotherhoods. Sufi individualism also remained undiminished in the countryside where 



indigenous practices included the ecstatic dervish dance combined with secretive, 
ceremonial, and non-doctrinaire customs. Even the pre-lslamic cults of ancestors and 
shamans were observed, as were magical ceremonies that attended marriages and 
funerals. Submerged within the Soviet Union, Islam did not become more visible until the 
late 1980s when Muslims of the Soviet Union were allowed much greater freedom to 
practice their religion during the war in Afghanistan, so that when the five "Stans" 
became independent in 1991, the Islam that emerged was an amalgam of the old, the 
obscure, the modified, and the new. 

Those leaders who had inherited control of the governments in the new Central Asian 
republics had little understanding and less appreciation for the Islamist crosscurrents 
that had emerged in modern Islam, and the practices of their own people differed 
significantly from the Salafism that influenced the jihadists who had fought against the 
Russians in Afghanistan. The Central Asian secularists, however, had absorbed the 
history of Soviet totalitarianism and its use of political power. They soon perceived that 
Salafist Islam was a direct challenge to their own survival, and the best means to 
quarantine it was to adopt the constitutional principles of a democratic society, in 
particular the separation of church and state, but the legal codes adopted after 
independence were simply insufficient to regulate Islamic movements, charities, or 
international Islamic NGOs. Similar problems beset the emerging states of Azerbaijan 
and Georgia in the west. Although they were secular by choice, there was a dramatic 
increase in the creation of the mahalla (neighborhood organization), voluntary giving 
through waqf, and even the collection and distribution of zakat, and each of the Central 
Asian states became full members of the politically conservative QIC. 



Outsiders begin to arrive 

In 1989 Saudi Arabia initiated a dynamic program to rebuild Islamic religious 
institutions in Central Asia. It subsidized the pilgrimage to Mecca, built mosques, and 
provided scores of scholarships for students to attend madrasas in Saudi Arabia, where 
they were exposed to Wahhabi practices of Islam and the doctrines of Salafist theology. 
In the first four years after independence the number of mosques, madrasas, and 
seminaries in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan alone quadrupled as "various kinds of religious 
missionaries flooded into the cities and towns. " [3401 The first radical Islamist group to 
appear in Central Asia was the clandestine and secretive Hizb ut-Tahrir al-lslami 
(Islamic Liberation Party, HuT) whose members were to be found in the nascent Islamic 
Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). HuT had been founded in Palestine in 1951 by Shaykh 
Taqiuddine an-Nabhani al-Falastini, a Quranic scholar, author, politician, Muslim 
Brother, former Al Azhar student, and gad/ in the Court of Appeals in Jerusalem. An 
Islamist in the line of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, Nabhani not only opposed the 
kafirin and the Soviet atheists with equal vigor, he was the unflagging enemy of Muslim 
secularists such as Gamal Abdel Nasser. Until his death in 1977 Nabhani was 
determined to transform the Islamic world by imposing Shari'a and eliminating secular 
governments. His organization was secretive, and the name of its amir, Abdul Qadeem 
Zalloum, who led the organization in the early 1990s from a secret location, was 
unknown for years. HuT had played a part in the coups d'etat that failed in Jordan and 
Syria in 1968, in Egypt in 1974, and Iraq and Tunisia in 1988, where in the latter forty 
of its members were tried by a military court in secret and executed. 



Nabhani and his successors claimed that HuT "does not engage in charity works or 
armed actions" rather, its presumed peaceful intentions were based on the "texts" of the 
Shari'a. [341l They sought to project the perception that HuT was devoted to the gradual 
evolution of society through al-da\va al-lslamiyya, "as opposed to al-thawra al-Muslimin 
[the Muslim Revolution] camp," which sought change "through rapid and often violent 
means. "[342] Thus, it was not a charity and did not pretend to be one It was a political 
movement "supported initially by the Saudi-based radical Islamist Wahhabi movement" 
operating from London, but the extent of Saudi support has remained a mystery and the 
organization is currently banned in Saudi Arabia. [343] HuT first infiltrated into Tajikistan, 
"setting up its first cells in Tashkent and the Ferghana Valley." There it was declared an 
"extremist" movement in 1995 by the government in Dushanbe, and soon afterwards all 
the Central Asian republics proscribed the organization, forcing it underground. 
Although HuT claimed to have "more than 60,000 supporters" in Tashkent alone and 
"tens of thousands in other cities," its leadership claimed no ties to Saudi Arabia or the 
Wahhabis. [3441 

The HuT movement does not appear to have spread after Tajikistan agreed to allow 
Russia to station troops in its territory for ten years; this greatly reduced the possibilities 
of a coup d'etat against the government of President Imomali Rakhmonov. [345] In 2000 
scores of HuT members were put on trial in Dushanbe and charged with "illicit 
activities," including the formation of "organizations advocating racial, ethnic, and 
religious bigotry." It was also charged with plotting to overthrow the secular government. 
Indeed, the HuT movement was "active in various parts of the Islamic world" and its goal 
remained to resume the "Islamic way of life by reestablishing the Islamic State. " [3461 
Throughout the Central Asian Crescent thousands of HuT members were arrested, but 
the clandestine organization was hard to crush given its network of cells, often 
numbering no more than three members, and the leadership remained unrepentant: 
"Whenever there is a Muslim Amir who declares Jihad to enhance the World of All and 
mobilizes the people to do that, the members of Hizb ut-Tahir will respond in their 
capacity as Muslims in the country where the general call to arms was 
proclaimed. " [3471 After 9/11 the US anti-terrorist campaign against the Taliban 
government and the occupation of Afghanistan by coalition forces contributed greatly to 
the stability of both the political and economic condition in Tajikistan, and the threat from 
HuT virtually disappeared. 

Although the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) had reported "Wahhabite 
propaganda" during the last days of the Soviet Union, diplomatic relations were 
established for the first time between Russia and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1990. 
Embassies were subsequently opened in their respective capitals. The Russian-Saudi 
detente and diplomatic recognition were "preceded by a secret visit" from Tariq bin 
Laden, younger brother of Osama, representing the Saudi Bin Laden Group. He 
appears to have been instrumental in facilitating the establishment of the Saudi 
diplomatic mission in Moscow. Shortly thereafter the embassy was opened with a very 
active "Department of Islamic Affairs, with the collaboration of the World Islamic League 
(Saudi Arabia), [and] the Ministry for Islamic Affairs Organization." The Voice of Saudi 
Arabia "became one of the major channels for financing subversive elements in the 
Russian Muslim community," and the diffusion of Wahhabite theology appeared first "in 
Daghestan and in Chechnya" in the Caucasus. [3481 Russian critics, who perceived that 
the Salafist Islamists were dividing the world into the dar-ul-islam (the realm of Islam) 
and the dar-ul-harb (the realm of war), argued that Islam had declared war on Russia. 



Russian intelligence was soon very concerned that agents from the Saudi General 
Intelligence Service were supervising the activities of the Muslim employees of Islamic 
charities. [349] FSB was especially interested in Ikraa (Laa ikraa-haa fid-deen - "There 
is no compulsion in religion," Quran 2:256), a mysterious charity with headquarters in 
Jidda whose president, Mohammed Abed al-Yamani, had close ties with the Saudi royal 
family and with Saudi financial circles, particularly the Bin Mahfouz family. Ikraa sent 
Wahhabi clergy from the Gulf to apply pressure on the traditional Islamic clergy in 
Central Asia and in Moscow, Volgograd, Ulyanovsk, Astrakhan, and Yakutsia to adhere 
more closely to Wahhabi Islamic principles. Their more overt efforts were made in the 
Caucasus, especially in Dagestan, where Ikraa opened its first madrasa in February 
1992 It also financed a printing house administered by Servakh Abed Saad from UAE, 
who began printing Islamist material at Pervomansk. Ikraa publications spread quickly 
through the Caspian region, and Ikraa mujahideen were "trained in Saudi Arabia, 
Egypt, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. "1350] Saad redoubled his propaganda and sent 
reports to the Saudi embassy in Moscow as the violence in the Caucasus escalated, 
before moving on to war-torn Chechnya in August 1999. 



Islam in Tajikistan 

In September 1991 the Supreme Soviet proclaimed Tajikistan an independent state. 
Three months later Tajikistan and ten other former Soviet republics banded together in 
the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Along with other Central Asian 
republics, Tajikistan had historically been a drain on the resources of both imperial 
Russia and the Soviet Union. And like its neighbors, Tajikistan formed part of the Islamic 
cultural sphere, a world far removed from the Christian, parliamentary republics of 
Russia, Belorussia, and the Ukraine. 

Prior to the departure of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989 the Afghan-Arab 
mujahideen had provided support to Tajikistan mujahideen. Thereafter, Afghan-Arabs 
allied with the Hizb Nahda (the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan, IRPT), which 
was formally established in 1990. The rapid evolution of an indigenous Islamist 
movement had begun with the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev, which loosened the 
hitherto tight control over the Soviet republics by Moscow. A respected Sufi and mullah, 
Akhbar Turajanzade, the kazikolon (Muslim leader) of Tajikistan, assumed an important 
role in its development. Despite the prohibition against Muslim political movements, IRPT 
was a dynamic Islamist movement when Tajikistan became independent in September 
1991. It was defeated, however, in Tajikistan's first election in October by the movement 
of Rakhmon Nabiev, the former head of the Tajik Communist Party. Claiming election 
fraud, IRPT initiated hunger strikes. In March 1992 it led anti-government 
demonstrations in Shahidon Square in the capital, Dushanbe, while pro-communist 
demonstrators opposed them from nearby Ozodi Square. Violent clashes and bloodshed 
followed, and the situation was only temporarily stabilized by the intervention of the 
201st Division of the Russian army A coalition government soon collapsed, and the 
conflict between the pro-communist Popular Front based in Kulobi and IRPT escalated 
into open warfare throughout the autumn of 1992. 

On 18 November 1992 the different Tajik factions held a conference in the northern 
city of Khujand, which had witnessed no violence, at the end of which the Supreme 



Soviet, which in effect acted as a parliament, appointed Imomali Rakhmonov, who had 
previously been just a mid-level official and the leader of the Kulobi Soviet People's 
Deputies, head of state. Rakhmonov inherited a Tajikistan overwhelmed by a ruined 
economy, its administration destroyed, and a fragmented society of communists, 
democrats, and Islamists. The government supporters were determined to "fight to 
victory" against the Islamists: the opposition were determined to crush communism in 
order to establish the Islamist state. Rakhmonov chose to distance himself from the 
extremists in either group, and sought the intervention of CIS, Russia, Iran, and the UN 
to establish a ceasefire and open negotiations between his government and the United 
Tajik Opposition (UTO) which had joined IRPT. UTO consisted of some 10,000 
mujahideen led by the Saudi Commander Khattab, who just arrived in Afghanistan in 
1987. He had returned home only to come back to Peshawar as an employee of a 
Saudi charity. Khattab's Tajik mujahideen had gained notoriety by launching several 
assaults against Soviet outposts on the Tajikistan border. By 1989, he was receiving 
substantial financial support from Pakistani and Saudi charities. 

As these events unfolded the economic and political chaos that had overwhelmed 
Tajikistan led many Tajik, particularly the young men who had been deeply influenced 
by the conflict in Afghanistan and the Islamist mujahideen who had fought there, to seek 
answers for their spiritual and economic impoverishment in the certainties of Salafism, a 
disciplined theology that forced one to live in accordance with Islamic practice at the 
time of the Prophet Muhammad. Tajikistan was a hospitable place for redundant Sunni 
Afghan-Arabs because four of five Tajiks were Sunni. Only the Tajik of Badakhshan, 
located far to the east, were members of the Isma'ili sect of Shi'ite Islam, but they did 
not count for much. Not surprisingly, Al Qaeda had been welcomed by IRPT whose 
leadership had come from clandestine Islamist youth organizations influenced by the 
Muslim Brotherhood and the writings of Sayyid Qutb. In the subsequent civil war the 
rebels were an amalgam of a small group of indigenous Tajik religious extremists joined 
by Afghan-Arab jihadists and mujahideen from Afghanistan. [3511 

The Islamists were led in Tajikistan by Mullah Akhbar Turajanzade and by 
Mohammadsharif Himmatzoda, chairman of IRPT, who continued to operate from his 
base in Afghanistan. The latter received arms and assistance from Gulbuddin 
Hekmatyar and, after 1996, from the Taliban, who vigorously collected donations - 
mostly from opium producers and traffickers. The same pattern of support through 
Islamic charities that had worked so well in Afghanistan was now widely applied 
throughout the Central Asian crescent. Charities were usually run by Muslim outsiders 
and members of Al Qaeda to provide arms, cash, and supplies to jihad movements. 
From its offices in Peshawar the ubiquitous ISI of Pakistan quietly coordinated the 
activity of several Islamic organizations including HuT, the Ikhwan, and the Saudi 
Ibrahim bin Abdul-Aziz al-lbrahim Fund. It provided cash for the camps where "about 
400 fighters from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan mostly from Ferghana Valley were trained in 
Pakistan." [3521 

In 1996 Russia and Iran acted jointly to secure a ceasefire in the civil war. As 
mediators they opened negotiations in Dushanbe involving the government and 
UTO/IRPT. The thorny question that dominated the agenda was power-sharing. Was the 
government prepared to sacrifice the principle of secularism, which most Tajiks favored, 
to accommodate the Islamist demands for a share of state power? A compromise was 
eventually reached in 1997 whereby IRPT was given legal recognition, but secularism 
remained the central principle of the Tajikistan constitution. Ultimately a 70-30 



power-sharing percentage was agreed by which the government retained 70 percent of 
government positions. President Rakhmonov willingly agreed to build a broad-based 
Movement for National Unity and Revival involving all ethnic groups in an effort to 
overcome the traditional clientist and regional networks that had dominated Tajik political 
life. Both Russia and Iran agreed to be the guarantors of the 1997 General Agreement 
to end four years of civil war that had taken over 60,000 lives. The Afghan-Arabs faded 
away, including Commander Khattab, who later surfaced in the Caucasus. The process 
of refugee resettlement began as thousands of Tajiks returned from Uzbekistan, but the 
dilemma of secularism or Islamism remained unresolved. 



Heartland of Central Asia: Uzbekistan 

Modern Uzbekistan, a country of some 25 million people, lies in the ancient cradle 
between the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers with borders on all the other "Stans." 
Historically, it has been the center of empires and commerce. Its conquest by 
Alexander the Great about 330 BCE superimposed the culture and language of the 
Greeks, and the region soon became the crossroads of Asia, and the meeting place of 
Persian, Indian, and Greek cultures. Thereafter, Uzbekistan was swept by tidal waves of 
invaders, Huns and Turks between 484 and 1150 CE followed by the Turkic Mongols of 
Genghis Khan in 1220, andTimur (Tamerlane). From his center at Samarkand between 
1370 and 1405, he devastated and plundered the lands and empires from the 
Mediterranean to China, enabling him to construct mosques, minarets, and madrasas of 
stunning beauty in Samarkand and Bukhara and control the commerce that passed 
along the ancient "Silk Road." Uzbekistan was incorporated into Russia in the late 
nineteenth century, and after stiff resistance was made a Socialist Republic of the 
Soviet Union in 1924. 

In western Uzbekistan the Soviets introduced the cultivation of "white gold" (cotton) and 
grain by extensive irrigation that depleted the supply of water in a semi-arid land, 
shrinking its rivers and consequently the Aral Sea. Boundaries were drawn to divide and 
rule its ethnic groups. The Soviets developed the Ferghana Valley, home to a third of the 
population of Uzbekistan who live on the fertile flood plain of Syr-Darya around the city 
of Ferghana, founded on an ancient site by the Russians in 1876. Uzbekistan combines 
both the old and the new in Islam. The archaic contains the famed Islamic cities of 
Bukhara and Samarkand, whose intellectual, cultural, and religious life was known and 
revered throughout the Islamic world. Both cities were allowed to quietly decline during 
the seventy years of the Soviet occupation. They decayed despite the fact that Bukhara, 
the more renowned and older of the two, was the center of the Naqshabandi (literally 
engraver of wooden stamps) Sufi tariqa, founded in the fourteenth century by Shaykh 
Bahauddin Naqshabandi, whose mausoleum is located six miles east of Bukhara. During 
the Soviet era the site was defiled and used as a storage shed for fertilizer. 

Bukhoro-ye sharif (the noble Bukhara) is often called Islam's second city, with 350 
mosques and a hundred madrasas. The Soviets made it the center of their "Arab World" 
madrasa, where they carefully indoctrinated the future Muslim leaders in the USSR. 
However, the students were few, and under communism Islam presented no serious 
religious challenge to the state. This began to change dramatically after the dissolution 
of the Soviet Union in 1991. Pilgrims now came in ever-increasing numbers to visit the 



fabled mosques and holy shrines of Bukhara and Samarkand, and the Sunni Islam of 
the Hanafi religious school was now vigorously taught in the madrasas of these holy 
cities. Bahauddin Naqshabandi's shrine was restored, and the name of the main 
thoroughfare in Bukhara was changed from Lenin to Bahauddin Naqshabandi Street. 
Situated far to the west of the former communist capital, Tashkent, the two cities 
seemed isolated in a world of their own where language differentiated the proud 
Persian-speaking inhabitants from the rest of the country, but since one-quarter of the 
Uzbek population are members of the Naqshabandi Sufi order, the government very 
early perceived that the movement could be a constructive alternative to the puritanical 
teachings of the Wahhabi Islamists. 

As in Tajikistan, resurgent Islam in Uzbekistan was the result of perestroika, and the 
Soviet government had made no move to prorogue the nascent Salafist movements led 
by Muhammad Radjab, Hakim Kor, and Abduwal Mirza. Thousands of Qurans printed in 
Saudi Arabia suddenly appeared, young people began to enroll in religious rather than 
state schools, and wealthy Uzbeks, who had migrated from Bukhara to the Ferghana 
Valley, returned to build mosques to honor their ancestors. This religious effervescence 
was "exploited by international centers disseminating ideas of fundamental Islam." They 
had reacted more quickly to exploit local conditions than either the government or the 
official Muslim ulama, which resulted "in the increase in influence of the radical Islamic 
views. "[3531 On 24 March 1990 the first secretary of the Communist Party of 
Uzbekistan, Islam Abduganievich Karimov, was elected President of the Uzbek Soviet 
Socialist Republic, and the following year, along with the other "Stans," the Supreme 
Soviet proclaimed the independent Republic of Uzbekistan. In December 1991 Karimov 
became its President in a very dubious election, and the rival Erk and Birlik political 
parties were soon crushed and their leaders driven into exile. 

Although the Uzbek constitution provides for freedom of religion and the observance of 
religious holidays, the restoration of mosques and the reopening of Islamic colleges and 
religious foundations were registered and monitored by a State Committee on Religious 
Affairs. The Islamic clergy of Bukhara and Samarkand generally ignored the presence 
of the new Islamists and seemed oblivious of the Salafist revival in Tajikistan to the east 
and the Sunni renaissance in the Ferghana Valley. The Salafist Adolat (Equity) 
Movement in the Ferghana Valley, which in 1991-1992 sought to impose Islam as the 
state religion and with it the Shari'a, was driven underground and eventually shattered, 
as was HuT, which had a considerable following in Namangan, Ferghana, Andizhan, 
and Tashkent. 

Islamic charities from Pakistan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran were at 
first permitted to fund projects of "Islamic philanthropy" ranging from the construction 
and maintenance of mosques and madrasas to regional road construction. In the 
capital, Tashkent, the extent of that assistance was impossible to assess given the 
informal practices by which financial transfers were made. The stringent Law on Public 
Associations in 1991 was passed to control NGOs, and the registration of charitable 
organizations resulted in their careful surveillance. In August 1992, some seventy 
Islamic "scholars" from Saudi Arabia were deported for having maintained close 
relations with radical elements, and in 1993 the government cracked down on its own 
indigenous Islamists, forcing the opposition to leave for Afghanistan and Tajikistan 
where the Salafists founded the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). To combat IMU 
President Karimov continued with greater vigor his policy to build a secular state, while 
supporting an evolutionary growth in a regulated Islamic community under the orthodox, 



moderate ulama, but the appearance of IMU and other radical Islamist movments 
"exacerbated the problems facing Russian-speaking Uzbeks " Between 1991 and 1998, 
"around 600,000 of them emigrated - around half of them Russian." Unfortunately, the 
majority of emigres belonged to "the educated classes, people with professional training 
and reasonably high qualifications. " [3541 

IMU and HuT, which had begun to spill over from Tajikistan, were prorogued. Many 
mosques constructed by funds from the Gulf states were closed, and the activities of the 
surviving 2,000 mosques and various religious groups were monitored closely by 
Uzbekistan's intelligence service. The government organized committees of moderate 
Muslim leaders and scholars to preach and teach in the towns and villages to dissuade 
Uzbeks from joining or supporting Islamist movements, singling out teachers and 
graduates from Wahhabi institutions, the followers of the reactionary Imam Nazarov of 
Tashkent, and members of IMU. IMU was a special target, for the Islamist movements in 
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan were in a close alliance and their mujahideen, when hounded 
by the authorities, could always retire to safety in Afghanistan. In 1996 the Taliban 
openly sponsored IMU insurgents along the Amu-Darya River in the region of Termez, 
and when Osama bin Laden returned from the Sudan to settle in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda 
provided arms and trained Uzbek rebels. During the final stages in the war of the 
warlords in Afghanistan IMU joined the victorious Taliban movement while cooperating 
with the "Arab brigade 055" of Osama bin Laden, the extremist anti-Shi'ite 
Sipah-e-Sahaba, and the Lashkar-e-Jangvi of Pakistan. In the same year IMU became 
much more active under the leadership of Juma Namangani, a former Soviet 
paratrooper and mujahid with close ties to the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and ISI. Two 
years later Namangani became a deputy to Osama bin Laden. With an infusion of funds 
from drug trafficking Namangani plotted to overthrow all secular governments in Central 
Asia and began with a failed attempt to assassinate President Karimov in February 
1999.13551 The estimated numbers of IMU mujahideen active in Afghanistan increased 
from 500 in 1999 to 1,000 by 9/11, and in Uzbekistan IMU units began combat 
operations in the Ferghana Valley, Tashkent, and Surkhandarya. After the US invasion 
of Afghanistan IMU fought alongside the Taliban, and suffered heavy losses including 
the death of Juma Namangani in a US airstrike in November 2001 . 

By 2001 Bukhara and Samarkand appeared secure from the Islamists, and in the 
Ferghana Valley, which had at one time seemed vulnerable to infiltration by Taliban/AI 
Qaeda, all seemed quiet. Still, the low standard of living in that region, the lack of 
economic development, and high unemployment among the youth led to the clandestine 
growth of Akromaya, a youth movement in the Ferghana Valley, and HuT. After the 
expansion of the American presence in Uzbekistan that came after 9/1 1 , HuT became 
ever more radical. The Mufti of Uzbekistan, probably acting on orders from the 
President, responded by publishing a labia forbidding Muslims to have any contact with 
members of HuT. Nevertheless, Islamic institutions continued to support Islamist goals, 
and in fact collected zakat to finance the Islamic opposition to President Karimov. This 
led him to complain in October 2000 that the opposition dreamed of a caliphate to "take 
our country back to the Middle Ages, the age of obscurantism, as if we are not living in 
the 20th Century. "[356] He continued to ban opposition parties, muzzled the press, and 
used the threat of radical Islam to stamp out dissent. Between 1998 and 2000, some 
4,000-5,000 Muslims were imprisoned, and after 9/11 the Karimov government warned 
foreign NGOs to refrain from supporting Uzbekistan political organizations. [3571 Muslim 
charities were not the only ones told to stay out of politics, for the government also 



singled out the Open Society Institute of American billionaire George Soros and three 
other American NGOs, warning them not to become involved in local politics. When a 
decree issued in December 2003 required some seventy-three aid and charitable 
institutions to re-register with the Justice Ministry, two Uzbek opposition parties were 
refused official recognition and the Uzbek parliament adopted a law banning all political 
parties from receiving any foreign assistance as President Karimov consolidated his 
dictatorship. 

The Islamists responded by attacks in Tashkent, but still the government remained 
unmoved and refused to permit mosques to reopen in Andizhan and other cities in the 
Ferghana Valley inhabited by the most devout Muslims in Uzbekistan. [3581 In April 2004 
there were further religious-inspired incidents in Tashkent and eastern Uzbekistan, once 
again threatening peace in the Ferghana Valley. Mosques were ordered to tighten 
controls over their own activities and a decree was issued, "ordering local government 
authorities to check up on the financial transactions of any Muslim religious institutions 
located within their area." In March 2005 Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf signed 
an agreement in Tashkent in which he promised to crack down on IMU terrorists still in 
Pakistan from launching attacks against Uzbekistan: "I have assured President 
[Karimov] that Pakistan will not allow the use of its soil by any terrorists from 
Uzbekistan ." [3591 



Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan 

Although Turkmenistan, like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, bordered on Afghanistan, its 
trans-Amu-Darya (Oxus) River region was relatively untouched by Afghan influence. 
Turkmenistan looked to the west, its lifeline the Caspian Sea where the bulk of its 5 
million people are congregated, leaving its southern region near Afghanistan sparsely 
populated. Unlike Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, however, the government of Saparmyrat 
Niyazov (Nyyazow), who seized the presidency in 1992 for life, was decidedly secular 
and enforced the separation of state and religion. Declared a Soviet Republic in 1925, 
during the ensuing years its Muslims had been administered by the Spiritual 
Administration for Muslims of Central Asia located in Tashkent and headed by a Kazi 
approved by the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the Spiritual 
Administration was replaced in June 1992. Kazi Hajji Nasrullah ibn Ibadulla officially 
registered the kaziate of Turkmenistan to replace it. The Turkmen Ministry of Justice 
duly approved the kaziate, but the government closely watched the activities of 
Khezretguly Khan, the chief Imam in the capital of Ashgabat. 

Under Article 3 of the Turkmenistan constitution "the freedom to profess a religion" or 
personal conviction is only restricted when "necessary to safeguard public safety and 
order." However, Article 6 declares that while religious practice is free to all, private 
religious instruction, whether in an Islamic madrasa or a Christian seminary, is 
prohibited. A cadre of officials from the Ministry of Justice vigorously enforced Article 
6, in which they demonstrated little tolerance for the many mullahs who had profoundly 
suffered under the Soviet regime. Xenophobia reached new heights in February 2004 
when President for Life Saparmyrat Niyazov, the Great, who enjoys the title 
Turkmenbashi (leader of the Turkmen), fired 15,000 people in the health-care sector 
and replaced them with conscripts from the Turkmen army and by ill-educated civil 
servants. In the private sector the government would no longer recognize the degrees of 



doctors, lawyers, and teachers. The Turkmenbashi patiently explained that these 
draconian decrees were necessary to dissuade people from sending their children 
abroad for a university education, a practice commonly employed when higher 
education was reduced to just two years. [3601 

Needless to say, under such a regime with a President obsessed by the cult of his 
personality, there was little room for dissent and only limited Islamic charitable giving in 
Turkmenistan. Islamic and Christian charities were circumscribed, which is perhaps 
why they cooperated with one another. When the American Red Cross arrived in 
Ashgabat in 1992, it worked closely with local Islamic charities and even shared office 
space in the building that housed the Turkmenistan Red Crescent Society. Activity that 
had been tolerated but restricted in the past was further circumscribed in May 2004 
when the government imposed major restrictions on religious freedom - not only for 
Muslims, but for Christians as well. The Islamic community, in a pattern similar to that 
imposed in Libya by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and his self-deification in the Green 
Book : was forced to regard the Ruhnama (The Book of the Soul), written by Niyazov, as 
"a sacred work on a par with the Koran." It is mandatory reading in all the schools. [3611 
Meetings at the government Ruhyyet (Spirituality Palace) were carefully orchestrated, 
and Niyazov shrewdly managed to reduce the importance of WAMY, the Islamic youth 
organization, by subordinating it to the Magtymguly Youth Association of Turkmenistan. 
He also pre-empted the role of the traditional Muslim mqf by using his own 
multi-million-dollar charitable fund to support his own political objectives. [3621 In his 
usual abrupt fashion President Niyazov revised his policy in June 2004, perhaps 
realizing that some assistance was better than none and "eased restrictions on charity 
aid for religious groups." He created new legal guarantees for religious freedom and 
freedom of worship, and he improved the legislation that had greatly circumscribed the 
activity of religious organizations. [3631 Few took his actions seriously. 

Kazakhstan, potentially the richest of the emerging Central Asian states, also limited 
the activity of Islamic institutions, political parties, and politico-theological movements. 
After independence in 1991, Turkey - not the Arab states - assumed responsibilities for 
"cultural and Islamic integration" in Kazakhstan and provided substantial financial 
assistance. Still, when the pan-Turkic Nurji sect, banned in Turkey, failed to achieve 
influence in Kazakhstan, a window of opportunity opened for the Gulf Islamists to make 
their presence felt. The national newspaper, Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, soon reported 
that the South Kazakhstan Humanitarian Academy (formerly the Kazakh-Kuwait 
Humanitarian Academy) at Shymkent, the administrative center of southern Kazakhstan, 
was receiving questionable financial assistance from the Kuwait-based Jamiyat al-lslah 
al-ljtimai (Social Reform Society). The students observed strict Islamic rules and were 
"instructed to grow beards and wear long dresses in line with the 'unwritten rules.'" The 
tuition-free academy could "well have been mistaken" for a madrasa, and its lecturers 
were a varied crew, "coming from Turkey, Sudan, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and 
Egypt." The Kuwaiti society was aggressively building mosques and "using sadaqa to 
help the poor." Its "goals" were unclear and its educational curriculum "a bit 
dubious. " [3641 

Kuwait was not alone in its interest in Kazakhstan. Saudi Arabia used financial 
investments and Islamic charities to spread its influence. Tablih missionaries, who 
constituted a loose network of itinerant preachers calling for a return to the teachings of 
the founding fathers of Islam, arrived from Pakistan; Al Azhar sent Egyptians to teach in 
Islamic schools. The Egyptian Ministry for Religious Affairs and Waqf signed an 



agreement with the government of Kazakhstan to further religious education, and the 
Egyptian government sponsored the construction of the Nur-Mubarak Academy in 
Almaty. These official overtures to orthodox Islam did not obscure the determination of 
the government to crush clandestine Islamist movements in the late 1990s, beginning 
with HuT. HuT had moved into southern Kazakhstan from Uzbekistan where the 
movement had been charged with a variety of illegal activities including inciting 
revolution and fostering religious discord. It had begun to infiltrate the zhamaghat 
(Islamic communities), the education system, the police, and the professions. Unlike 
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan did not place the HuT on its list of banned organizations, but by 
2004 its survival depended on the ability of its members to circumvent a 1998 religious 
law that made it illegal to distribute printed materials or proselytize without government 
approval. In 2004 the government reported that the "current situation around Islam does 
not raise any serious concerns. " 13651 Yet it remains to be seen if the influence of HuT, 
which is now especially strong among the Kazakh youth, will threaten the survival of the 
Kazakhstan secular state. [3661 The Muslim Religious Office for Kazakhstan remained 
vigilant, even investigating the activities of officially registered mosques and charities 
and the various independent Islamic zhamahgats. Also closely scrutinized were the 
efforts of Saudi Arabia to "change the face of Islam in Kazakhstan" by introducing 
Wahhabite doctrines and in particular the activities of Islamic centers and their 
sponsors, the "Islamic charity funds. " [3671 



Kyrgyzstan: door to China 

After the Supreme Soviet proclaimed the Republic of Kyrgyzstan in 1991, Kyrgyzstan 
enjoyed nearly ten years as an island of stability and democracy among the "Stans" of 
Central Asia. Historically, the Kyrgyz were a Turkic pastoral people following their herds 
across the mountain massif of the Tien Shan that dominates 95 percent of the country. 
During the twentieth century, both under the Tsars and then the Soviets, large numbers 
of Russians colonized Kyrgyzstan, where they received the best agricultural land and 
introduced modern farming in the south that forced many of the southern Kyrgyz to 
abandon their nomadic culture. Nevertheless, cattle breeding continued to dominate the 
economy of the northern region and seemed a perfect economic match for the 
agriculture of the south, encouraging the Kyrgyz to vote overwhelmingly for free-market 
reforms in 1994. Kyrgyzstan did not possess the profound Islamic heritage of its 
neighbors: during the Soviet era religious freedom was a reality despite the fact that 
Islam had been contained, the Muslim clergy restrained, and those mullahs who were 
not registered with the authorities imprisoned. After independence Islamists exploited the 
Republic's religious freedom to penetrate into the southern region from Uzbekistan and 
Tajikistan, where a number of schools and mosques came under their control. 

In general the Sunni Muslims of the Hanafite and Shafi'ite madhhabs (way, 
interpretation) rejected Islamist Salafist ideology, and in July 1995 the Kyrgyz National 
Security Council "met to discuss what they called the 'Muslim offensive'" in southern 
Kyrgyzstan. Members of the Council were "alarmed" by the alleged existence of mullahs 
with criminal records actively propagating Islam in the region. They argued for the 
reestablishment of the moribund Committee on Religious Affairs in order to monitor 
Islamist activities, including those of Islamic charities around Osh at the eastern end of 
the Ferghana Valley. Osh was home to Kyrgyzstan's Uzbeks, who total some 13 percent 



of Kyrgyzstan's population, and the bloody ethnic clashes between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz 
in 1989-1990 had not been forgotten. [3681 Years of religious tranquility came to an 
end, and in the autumn of 1999 mujahideen from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan 
(IMU) invaded the mountainous Bakten region of Kyrgyzstan, kidnapping a group of 
Japanese geologists. It created a cause celebre that brought international publicity to the 
hitherto unknown local Islamists - Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik. The Kyrgyz National 
Security Council at first made conciliatory efforts to reduce ethnic tension between 
Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in eastern Ferghana, but then moved forcefully to halt the spread of 
the emerging Salafist movement in the south It wanted no replication of the tragedy in 
Tajikistan. 

In May 2004 another team of Uzbeks from the Andizhan Uzbekistan Interior Ministry, 
accompanied by two Kyrgyz from the Osh Interior Ministry, were caught secretly filming 
people attending Friday prayers at a large mosque in Karasuu. Their cameras and 
cassettes were seized by the local citizens and handed over to the police, who passed 
them on to members of HuT present at the scene before they in turn relinquished them 
to the local government after viewing the film. Since several hundred Uzbeks regularly 
crossed the border to attend Friday prayers, and the mosque had been the focal point 
for the gathering of Islamists, it was an indication that even though religious freedom did 
exist in Kyrgyzstan, the authorities kept a close watch on ethnic Uzbeks who were 
thought to be most susceptible to Islamist penetration. China, of course, maintained its 
vigilant military patrols along its border with Kyrgyzstan to prevent Islamist penetration of 
its western frontier, where in Xinjiang there are more than 18,000 Uighur Muslims in 
detention. 

In April 1996 the Presidents of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan 
met in Shanghai to discuss border security and the serious threat from Afghan-Arabs 
and Islamists in Afghanistan as they began to infiltrate northward into Central Asia and 
the western Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. In spite of many decades of 
colonization by ethnic Chinese, the Han remained a minority, accounting for only 38 
percent of its population, but the vast resources of Xinjiang - iron, oil, grain, and 
hydroelectric power - were now to be exploited for the dynamic Chinese economy. 
China would not tolerate any threat to the security of Xinjiang by militant religious 
movements. The meeting ended with an agreement for the parties to cooperate and 
coordinate their activities in order to secure their borders with China. In June 2001 the 
"Shanghai Five" became six when Uzbekistan, which did not border on Xinjiang, joined 
the alliance. By then strategy had been expanded from containment into an agreement 
known as the Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to "prevent, expose 
and halt terrorism, separatism and extremism. " [3691 "Extremism" was an ill-disguised 
code word used to define not only Islamists but also the "East Turkestan" separatists 
who were active in Xinjiang. The following year the signatories met in St. Petersburg to 
sign the Charter for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. A proposal for a sweeping 
anti-terrorist agency was tabled, but the members opened an anti-terrorism center in 
Tashkent in which the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia were invited to 
participate. [3701 



Transcaucasia 

When travel restrictions were eased throughout the Soviet empire during the years of 



perestroika in the late 1980s, Saudi charitable institutions supported the travel of 
hundreds of Wahhabi mullahs to proselytize in the Caspian and Caucasus. Their 
mission was given greater definition and guidance in 1992 when a "Memorandum of 
Advice" was signed by 107 leading Saudi religious figures that called for the strict 
enforcement of Islamic law, Shari'a, and the severing of all relations with non-Islamic 
states. The Saudi royal family reacted with anger to this peremptory attempt to export 
religious extremism and promptly dismissed from the Saudi Supreme Authority of Senior 
Scholars those members who refused to condemn the memorandum. It then began to 
suppress the more radical clerics, many of whom thought it wiser to seek refuge in 
Central Asia, the Caspian, and the Caucasus mountains, supported by 
Saudi-sponsored and Saudi-approved charities. 

When Azerbaijan became independent in 1991, its Muslim community, two-thirds of 
whom were Azeri Shi'ites, was under the authority of the Spiritual Administration for 
Muslims of Transcaucasia with its headquarters in Baku. Led by Shaykh-ul-lslam 
Allahshukyur Pasha-Sade, it supervised both Shi'ite and Sunni mosques, and 
maintained a reputation for diplomacy and sensitivity. Freedom of worship was 
guaranteed by law, and there were no restrictions on the activities of religious charities, 
either indigenous or foreign. At the time there existed only a very small Islamist 
movement, the Azerbaijan Islam Party (AIP), which had been founded during the Soviet 
era, but its financial and religious ties with Iran were of greater concern to the 
authorities than its subversion of orthodox Shi'ites and Sunnis. It was this very religious 
freedom that attracted Wahhabi Islamists from the Gulf; they soon discovered, however, 
that they and their message were not welcome in a country where the Azeri, a Turkic 
people who had already fought off a decade of Iranian infiltration, did not now want the 
Wahhabis. In 1994, during the first Muslim campaign against Russian rule in Chechnya, 
mujahideen from Afghanistan began to arrive in Baku by bus from Turkey. Laws were 
enacted in 1996 and 1998 forbidding foreign citizens to engage in religious 
propaganda, and although a few Salafists in Baku had sought to create an Islamist 
political organization, Islamist activities in the "Stans" across the Caspian were more 
than sufficient to convince the government to terminate their activities in 1997. 

At the turn of the twenty-first century the Azeri authorities expanded their investigations 
of Islamic charities to include Ikraa, then directed by Saleh Abdallah Kamel, President 
of the Dallah Al Baraka Group of Jidda. Kamel was thought to have been the moving 
spirit in the Al Riad Foundation, which funded mosques and madrasas in Kazakhstan. In 
1999 its affiliate in Azerbaijan, the Foundation for Chechnya, used the Dallah Al 
Barakah Group to fund Chechen gangs and separatists in Azerbaijan, including two 
centers that trained Salafist propagandists. The centers were staffed by Islamists from 
Saudi Arabia and members of the Yemen Islah movement headed by Shaykh Abdul 
Madjid al-Zindani, an associate of Osama bin Laden and Hasan al-Turabi. The 
government of Azerbaijan contained the growing Islamist presence by strengthening the 
indigenous Shi'ite charities, building mosques and madrasas, and maintaining close 
surveillance on the international organizations. In Transcaucasia the laws governing 
charitable activities passed in 1994 and improved in 1997 were perhaps the most 
stringent in all the former Soviet republics. Thus, when NGOs did not follow the legal 
regulations, their offices were closed and their activities proscribed. The Chagyrush 
Society and the Kuwaiti Society for the Revival of Islamic Heritage were charged with 
"propagating religious fanaticism," and using mosques to attract young mujahideen to 
fight in Chechnya. They were told to leave. [3711 Finally, after years of questionable 



activities the Al Haramain Foundation in Azerbaijan was also closed in 2000 



Republic of Georgia 

Undoubtedly, the same Saudi and Gulf charitable organizations assisting the transit of 
Afghan-Arab mujahideen to Chechnya were also funding the passage of numerous 
mujahideen into the Republic of Georgia by 1999. 13721 When Georgian authorities 
began investigating their activities, they discovered that Madli, an affiliate of BIF in 
Chicago registered in Georgia in 1999, was "conducting illegal activities in the Pankisi 
Gorge." Madli had received at least $850,000 in foreign funds to be used for 
humanitarian purposes, but many of the 4,000 impoverished local refugees were so 
frightened by these foreigners that they had little contact with any Islamic charity. 

The Pankisi Gorge, an isolated valley surrounded by inaccessible mountains and 
located in the Republic of Georgia near the Dagestan-Georgia-Chechnya tri-point, had 
for years served as a base of operations for Chechen-Arabs "who trained new recruits 
for jihad in neighboring Chechnya." In addition, mujahideen were recruited from 
Lebanon's refugee camps by the Sunni-dominated and Al Qaeda-friendly Usbat Al 
Ansar (Partisans' League); it used the IIRO operation in the Pankisi Gorge to support 
jihadist activity in Chechnya. [3731 Following 9/11 American-trained Georgian security 
forces captured fifteen Al Qaeda militants in the Pankisi Gorge, including Saif al-lslam 
al-Masri, a member of Al Qaeda's shura, and turned them over to American 
authorities. [3741 In the elections of 2004 Mikheil Saakashvili replaced Eduard 
Shevardnadze as President of Georgia He admitted that Chechen mujahideen had 
indeed been permitted to move freely across Georgia, but he "was determined to put a 
stop to it." Saakashvili argued that "Wahhabism represented a threat to Georgian 
secularism," and that some of the villages in the Pankisi Valley had already turned into 
"centers of Wahhabism where schools were propagating Wahhabism." He promised 
that foreign funding of "Pankisi-based fundamentalist groups" would be terminated. 
Georgia was committed to freedom of religion, but those who would propagate 
Wahhabism could expect no compromise and would be severely punished, for 
Wahhabism was an "unacceptable, hostile ideology. " [3751 



Chechnya 

Situated in the mountainous southern border of Russia, Chechnya has during the past 
two hundred years had a history of resistance and tragedy in its relations with Russia. 
After a long and bloody campaign the armies of the Christian Tsar finally overcame the 
resistance of the Muslim Imam Shamil in 1859, and Chechnya was incorporated into the 
Imperial Russian Empire. Sixty years later at the end of the First World War and the 
upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution the Chechens experienced a few brief years of 
independence before once again being overwhelmed, this time by the Red Army. 
Chechnya became the Chechen Autonomous Region in 1922, and in 1934 it was joined 
with the Ingush Autonomous Oblast to form the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet 
Socialist Republic. During the Second World War when the Chechens and Ingush were 
accused of collaborating with the Germans, over 425,000 Chechens were deported to 



Kazakhstan and hundreds of mosques, cemeteries, and Islamic libraries in Chechnya 
were destroyed. Thousands of the exiles died during transit and in Kazakhstan until they 
were allowed to return in 1957 to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Chechnya during the 
regime of Nikita Khrushchev. 

During the dying days of the Soviet empire a National Congress of the Chechen 
people gathered in November 1990 in Grozny, the capital, in which large expatriate 
communities from Syria and Jordan participated. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 
1991, the Chechens were prepared to hold elections in October in which a former 
general in the Soviet Air Force, Dzhokar Dudayev, was elected President. In November 
the independence of the Republic of Ichkeria or Chechnya was proclaimed, and in the 
following year the Ingush minority in Chechnya was granted its own territorial Republic 
of Ingushetia. Despite Chechen aspirations Moscow refused to recognize the 
independence of either Chechnya or Ingushetia as it had done for the Muslim republics 
of Central Asia. The result was predictable. During the next three years armed groups of 
Chechens increased their hold on Chechnya as Dudayev became ever more defiant of 
orders from Moscow, where the leadership was divided as to what to do. It was during 
these years that Islamic charities began to support their fellow Muslims and those 
Afghan-Arabs who came to carry on their jihad against Russia. 

After President Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika had relaxed state control of religion, 
travel in the Soviet Union and its republics was made easier for Islamic clerics and Arab 
visitors, and by 1991 Saudi Arabia was using its Islamic charities in Chechnya to 
finance "Wahhabites," a pejorative term used in Russia to describe the various Islamist 
movements regardless of their origins. Many of the unemployed Afghan-Arab 
mujahideen, who had congregated in eastern Afghanistan and Peshawar after the war, 
appeared not only in the Sudan and the Balkans but also in Chechnya. Neither they nor 
"Wahhabite" clerics, however, were welcome in Chechnya where the universality of 
Wahhabism antagonized those who had absorbed local customs into Sufi Islam. 

The contradictions between the tribes and regions, flatlands and mountains of 
Chechnya, and between "Wahhabites" and the traditional Muslim Chechens with their 
Chechnya Sufi brotherhoods became ever more self-evident by 1992; Islamic clerics 
were now classified either as "Traditionalists," who followed the older, more conservative 
and local Sufi leadership, or as "Reformers," "Jama'at," or "Al Risala," a small but 
militant group of Salafist revolutionaries. Under the influence of the Uzbek scholar and 
Islamist Abdur Rahman, the Islamist movement expanded even more rapidly with the 
arrival in Chechnya of Shaykh Fathi (aka Abu Sayyaf), a Jordanian Islamist 
revolutionary. He urged his Chechen followers to "take the best from Ikhwan, Salafi, and 
Tabliqhi." [3761 Religious tensions soon erupted into armed conflict. In December 1993 
Dudayev attended the PAIC in Khartoum where Hasan al-Turabi, Ayman al-Zawahiri, 
and the Salafists represented the vanguard of the New Islamic Order. Returning to 
Chechnya, Dudayev infuriated Moscow by urging the Islamic world "to form an alliance 
against the West." Soon "no less than 75 representatives of the traditional Chechen 
clergy were killed" as the Salafist Islamists relentlessly drew the Chechens into their 
orbit, making them hostages to "those committed to destroy the Russian grip on the 
Caucasus."[377] 

Determined that the growing separatist and Islamist movements in Chechnya had to be 
checked, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered 40,000 troops to remove Dudayev 
and smash the separatists and the Islamists as well. The campaign was poorly planned, 



and the early promises of a quick victory evaporated in the face of fierce Chechnyan 
resistance and heavy Russian losses. The capital, Grozny, was eventually captured 
after its destruction, at a cost of some 30,000-100,000 dead. Hundreds of Afghan-Arab 
mujahideen, now known as "Chechen-Arabs," responded to the jihad to fight the Urus 
kufr (Russian infidels). In 1994 an "exploratory group of first-generation Afghan-Arabs 
led by Amir (Commander) Khattab arrived in Chechnya to assist the out-gunned 
Chechens." Osama bin Laden in the Sudan offered $1,500 to any mujahideen for the 
purchase of a kalashnikov and travel expenses to Chechnya. When the jihad in Bosnia 
had withered after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in November 1995, Al 
Qaeda sent men, arms, and money, and "some Chechens went to Afghanistan" for Al 
Qaeda military training. [3781 

Although the International Islamic Brigade (MB) of Commander Khattab was never very 
large, his influence became more pervasive when Shamil Basayev, the most prominent 
Chechen field commander, declared Khattab his "brother" and began to coordinate 
activities with IIB J3791 The presence of Chechen-Arabs assured the Chechen 
resistance access to the financial resources of wealthy Islamic charities. Khattab 
opened training-camps in southeastern Chechnya where Chechen and foreign 
mujahideen were given military training. He obtained funds through "official" charities 
such as the Al Haramain Foundation and from other Islamic charities specifically 
established to support the jihad in Chechnya. Quasi-charities such as the Al Kifah 
Refugee Center in Brooklyn and a new charity, BIF in Chicago, were eager to supply 
financial assistance. Its popular website indicated how and where one could donate 
zakat for Chechnya that BIF would then transfer in cash and purchase weapons for the 
Chechnya mujahideen. 13601 

Amid the growing public outcry against the heavy losses sustained by the Russian 
army and the failure to defeat the separatist Chechen rebels, Alexsandr Lebed, then 
chief of security for Boris Yeltsin, negotiated an agreement in 1996 for a ceasefire. 
Chechnya was granted substantial autonomy, but not independence. General Asian 
Maskhadov, chief of staff of the Chechnya military, who had swiftly forged a ragtag 
army into an effective armed Chechen force, played a dominant role in the peace 
negotiations. A pragmatist, he won the respect of both the Russians and the Chechens, 
and in the elections of January 1997 defeated his rival, Shamil Basayev. Maskhadov 
sought to assuage his loss by appointing him Acting Prime Minister. Nonetheless, the 
following year Basayev defected and joined former field commanders who had 
degenerated into warlords growing rich from organized crime and kidnapping foreign 
aid workers and Russian envoys. In religion Maskhadov was a conservative who 
encouraged the revival of Chechen religious traditions. He failed, however, to evict or 
contain the Salafist Islamists. When told to leave and take MB to fight elsewhere, Khattab 
defied Maskhadov by marrying a Muslim woman from neighboring Dagestan and joined 
the anti-Maskhadov resistance. Later, with an $1 1 -million price on his head, Asian 
Maskhadov was trapped and shot by the FSB in a bunker in Tolstoy-Yurt twelve miles 
north of Grozny on 8 March 2005. [3811 

In August 1999 units of MB and Chechen Islamists invaded the Republic of Dagestan, 
which shares a 355-mile border with Chechnya. Overwhelmingly Sunni, during the 
Soviet era Dagestan had only had one dominant Muslim leader, but perestroika and its 
subsequent social dislocation permitted numerous independent Muslim clerics to 
emerge and win local followers Prominent among them were two Sufi theologians with 



large fallowings, Said Chirkeisk and Tadjurin Hasavyut, who advocated strict 
interpretation of the Quran, and Maghomed Djeranskyi, who was more violent than 
theological in his advocacy. Even more Islamist were the Vakhabites, who first appeared 
in the North Caucasus in the 1980s but only emerged as a serious force in the next 
decade. The raids were led by Khattab's deputy, Abu Walid, who set up camps where 
the Vakhabites and other Dagestani Islamists could acquire weapons and military 
training. Their expectation was to unite the Islamist revolutionaries to fight for the 
secession of Dagestan from the Russian Federation as an Islamist state. The Russians 
carried out savage airstrikes, for they could not tolerate the loss of their southern 
frontier. The Islamists retaliated with a series of bombings that swept through Moscow 
with heavy loss of life. In October 1999 the Russians once again invaded Chechnya. 
Khattab and Abu Walid became heroes on scores of Islamist internet websites, but tens 
of thousands of civilians and 10,000 Russian conscripts died. Another 400,000 
Chechens fled to refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia. 

In Chechnya Asian Maskhadov was caught in the schism between the indigenous 
Chechen religious leaders and the Salafi Islamists. "Powerless in the face of well 
financed Salafi radicals," he surrendered those regions where field commanders 
supported radical Salafists.|382] Consequently, in May 2000 President Vladimir Putin 
imposed direct Russian rule in Chechnya and appointed Akhmad Kadyrov, a 
separatist-turned-Muslim- cleric, head of the Chechen government. In retaliation for 
appointing a "puppet" the Chechens launched attacks against Russian targets - at 
Gudermes, the headquarters of the Russian administration in Chechnya, and in 
Moscow. During these chaotic years Moscow sought to influence Saudi activity in 
Chechnya by encouraging Saudi charities to cease funding Chechen mujahideen . 
Kadyrov was welcomed in Riyadh, where he "campaigned hard to have aid funds sent 
directly to his administration in Grozny." Assassinated in May 2004, his tenure was too 
short to redirect the use of charitable funds or maintain "Saudi pressure on Islamic 
charities. " [3831 

It was no longer any secret that Chechen rebels were receiving financial support 
through Islamic charities. In 1991 the Al Haramain Foundation opened a branch office, 
the Foundation for Chechnya, in Azerbaijan, after which funds were filtered through the 
Al Baraka Bank and the Al Baraka Investment and Development Company of Saudi 
Arabia to Chechen separatists, including Shamil Basayev. In Saudi Arabia the royal 
family sponsored a television program to collect funds for Chechnya, and the ruler of 
Kuwait, Shaykh Jaber al-Ahmed Al Sabah, sent $3 million in a charitable "first 
installment" to the Chechens. In Qatar the Committee for Charity and the Shaykh 
Eid-ben Mohammed al-Thani Foundation solicited funds in a program supported by 
Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, a notorious member of the Muslim Brotherhood then living 
in Qatar. Qaradawi issued a fatwa allowing zakat money to be used for "poor and needy" 
refugees in Chechnya. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states were not the only donors. In 
the UK the Blessed Relief Foundation was busy transmitting funds to Chechnya through 
Azerbaiian. 13841 BIF-US sent some $700,000 to Chechnya during 1999-2000. The 
Department of Justice would later describe BIF as "a multinational criminal enterprise 
that for at least a decade used charitable contributions of innocent Americans - Muslim, 
non-Muslim and corporations alike - to support al Qaeda, the Chechen mujahideen and 
armed violence in Bosnia. " [3851 In Russia Izvestia disclosed that BIF offices in 
Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Moscow had spent $1.3 million in 2000-2001 on 
"projects" in Chechnya and recruited "volunteers" to work in Chechnya. A BIF official, 



Saif al-lslam al-Masri, was a member of Al Qaeda's military committee and a veteran of 
its Somalia campaign. When Moscow finally blocked the Foundation's assets in January 
2002, it was "just a small fragment of BIF assistance to the Chechen separatists. " [3861 



Lost opportunity and investigations 

In December 1996 a well-disguised visitor slipped across the Russian border between 
the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of EIJ, 
was in search of a safe haven. He was accompanied by Ahmed Salama Mabrouk, head 
of the EIJ cell in Azerbaijan, and Mahmud al-Hennawi, an Islamist who was familiar with 
the clandestine routes west of the Caspian and through the Caucasus. The crossing 
was perilous but necessary, for Zawahiri desperately needed a secure base. Zawahiri 
would later write that conditions in Chechnya "were excellent," for the ceasefire of 
August 1996 had ended two years of fighting and the Russian troops were withdrawing. 
Near Derbent in Dagestan he was arrested, however, and held for trial. For reasons that 
remain unclear the Russian intelligence agents never succeeded in penetrating 
Zawahiri's cover, and the Egyptian terrorist was released in May 1997, a year after the 
USA had declined to accept a Sudanese/Saudi offer to kidnap Osama bin Laden. 
Afghanistan and Bin Laden were now his only hope for safety and financial support. 
Once in Peshawar "Zawahiri became bin Laden's closest confidant and talent scout," 
and EIJ was soon absorbed by Al Qaeda. [3871 

After the renewal of war in Chechnya the FSB uncovered an Islamist network 
operating in "49 regions of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States." All 
were receiving support from the Muslim Brotherhood to "incite separatist feelings," and 
the Moscow branch was "working under the auspices of the Kuwait Joint Relief 
Committee" to provide "ideological, military and financial support." [388l Another Kuwaiti 
charity, the Society for Social Reform (SSR), one of the most powerful charitable 
organizations in Kuwait and registered in Russia in 1998, was active in the recruitment 
and infiltration of the governments of the former Soviet Republics. The Kuwaiti embassy 
in Moscow, rather disingenuously, claimed that it had never heard of the Society, which 
certainly was very much alive and well both in Russia and the North Caucasus. In 
Dagestan, Russian agents investigating the Ikraa charity gathered information on 
"Wahhabi enclaves" in Dagestan and Chechnya. It monitored the Salvation International 
Islamic Organization, a satellite whose director in Moscow was an Egyptian, Servakh 
Abed Saad, with ties to the Saudi intelligence services. Ikraa was staffed with many 
former Afghan-Arab mujahideen, and its offices throughout Asia provided employment 
for jihadists from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, and Yemen. Despite its declared aim 
to meet the "social and economic needs of the people," Ikraa provided military training 
and sponsored radical clerics to preach the Islamist message in Chechnya, while Ikraa 
mujahideen "swelled the ranks" of Chechen jihadists. [3891 

After 2000 Russia expelled hundreds of "Wahhabite" clerics "predominantly of Arab 
origin" from the North Caucasus. This was followed by a crackdown on the Salafists in 
the Volga region of Tatarstan where Islamists had sought to infiltrate the 
government-sponsored Central Spiritual Management of the Muslims of Russia and the 
Spiritual Management of the Muslims of Republics of North Caucasus. "In Moscow, 
Volgograd, Ulyanovsk, Astrakhan, even in Yakutsia," the Salafist Islamists could not 



have organized Quranic schools, built mosques staffed by friendly clerics, or founded 
Islamic cultural centers for the distribution of Wahhabi literature without receiving funds 
from the Gulf charities. Before fighting resumed in 1999 the Islamists circulated freely, 
but when the Chechen separatists began their terrorist attacks in Moscow, President 
Putin was determined "to protect the spiritual space of the country from the subversive 
influence of the geopolitical oppositors of Russia. 73901 

After 9/11, between October 2002 and August 2004, Chechen separatists, now 
terrorists, had carried out ten attacks including a theater siege and nine suicide truck, 
train, and airplane bombings. However, when the attack on Middle School Number One 
in Beslan in North Ossitia on 3 September 2004 killed 330, mostly innocent children, 
Russia and the world were stunned at the enormity of the atrocity. President Putin 
declared: "This is a total, cruel and full-scale war that again and again is taking the lives 
of our fellow citizens." Russia was placed on a war footing, and he promised "entirely 
new approaches to the way the law-enforcement agencies work. "[3911 The planning of 
such a large-scale terrorist operation fit the pattern established by Shamil Basayev in 
past terrorist attacks, including one on a hospital in Budyennovski in 1995. Three weeks 
later, on 23 September, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov announced the new 
Russian initiative to expand the UN list of terrorists by adding names to the 
counter-terrorism sanctions, declaring: "Those who slaughtered children in Beslan and 
hijacked the planes to attack the US are creatures of the same breed. " [3921 

There can be no doubt of the role that Islamic charities have played in supporting 
radical religious revolution in Chechnya and the destabilization of both its civil society 
and its traditional practices. Certainly, the Islamists were able to exploit a conflict that 
had already begun to systematically destroy Chechnya. Basayev's Salafist Islamist 
principles were foreign to the region and would have attracted only a small minority of 
indigenous radical Islamist revolutionaries were it not for ten years of the unenlightened 
Russian response to Chechen separatism. More positive actions were taken by the 
three dominant Muslim organizations in Russia, which joined together to combat Islamist 
extremism, while the Russian government enthusiastically supported an Islamic Center 
in Moscow where clerics could be trained rather than in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or at Al 
Azhar in Egypt. These measures, however, were regarded with contempt by the 
Islamists as impotent gestures, and they have continued to destabilize the entire North 
Caucasus. "It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Chechyna conflict is no longer 
an isolated one, confined to the borders of Chechnya, and it could even be said that the 
conflict has already lost its original ethnic and geo-geographical localization. The 
conflict is metastasizing. "[393] 



Chapter 8 From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia 



A revolutionary group like ours needs help from foreigners. 

an Abu Sayyaf commander, the Philippines, 1999 



On a bright, sparkling January morning in 1995 the occupants of the Doha Josefa 
Apartments, a nondescript rooming-house in a Manila barrio, had reason to be worried. 
The acrid smoke escaping from an empty apartment was enough to raise the alarm, and 
firemen responded immediately, for fires in the barrio can spread like the wind. They 
extinguished the blaze and discovered its source. Antagonistic compounds had been 
inadvertently brought together and had precipitated a chemical reaction, bursting into 
flames. The firemen immediately realized that someone in the apartment was making 
bombs or was attempting to do so, and they called the police. 

When the police searched the apartment, they discovered computer hard-drives and 
lists of telephone numbers that provided sobering information. The three Afghan-Arab 
occupants were the core of a team of five Al Qaeda members who had entered the 
Philippines from Singapore in 1994. Their clandestine activities involved the planning of 
a number of operations, including attempts to assassinate President Clinton during a 
visit to the Philippines in November 1994 and Pope John Paul II during his visit in 
January 1995. In addition, the three men were about to launch Operation Bojinka 
(Arabic slang for explosion), a plot to use suicide bombers to blow up two airliners as 
they approached Hong Kong. If that plan succeeded, and it was well under way, it would 
be followed by simultaneous hijacking of eleven US airliners, which would then be used 
as flying bombs to destroy the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and other major 
buildings in the USA. 

Operation Bojinka began to unravel after the Philippines police captured Abdul Hakim 
Murad, one of the three Al Qaeda agents, and the man who started the fire in the Dona 
Josefa Apartments. After hard questioning, Murad claimed he "served" Osama bin 
Laden, a mysterious Arab financier living in the Sudan who was generally unknown to 
the Philippine police. Murad and the captured hard-drives provided sufficient leads to 
enlarge the hunt for other Al Qaeda members operating in the Philippines. Of 
particularly interest was the team ringleader, Ramzi Yousef (aka Abdul Basit Karim), a 
member of the Al Qaeda inner circle. Yousef had founded the Bermuda Trading 
Company to import from Singapore the chemicals and supplies needed to make bombs, 
and he had trained members of the Abu Sayyaf (occasionally called Al Harakat 
al-lslamiyya), a Sunni jihadist movement active on the islands of Mindanao, Jolo, and 
Basilan. [3941 Yousef had been seen in Mindanao in the first months of 1994, and 
presumably established an Al Qaeda cell. He was relentlessly tracked down to Pakistan, 
captured, and deported to the USA where he was tried in 1997 and sentenced to life in 
prison for his leading role in the truck bomb that exploded in the garage beneath the 
World Trade Center in New York in February 1993. 

The third member of the team was Wali Khan Amin Shah. He was also involved in 
military training in Mindanao, the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul, the bombing of a 



Philippine Airlines flight in December 1994, the Operation Bojinka suicide mission, and 
a foiled plot to bomb foreign embassies. All three members of the Al Qaeda cell were 
under the control of Ramzi Yousef s uncle, an Afghan-Arab terrorist born in Kuwait, 
Khaled Shaykh Muhammad. Khaled was not only a key player in the various Al Qaeda 
plots in the Philippines but was also one of the principal participants in the World Trade 
Center bombing and later in the 9/11 terrorist attack. This very active Manila cell was 
financed by one "Amin," a Yemeni national, "rich businessman," and veteran of the 
Afghan war who used a money-changer in Dubai to transfer funds to the Philippine cell, 
the MWL, and IIRC U3951 

The discovery of the Al Qaeda cell and the information left behind when its members 
fled from their burning apartment also enabled the police to uncover, much to their 
surprise, the extent to which the radical Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization had become 
deeply entrenched throughout the Philippines. In 1994 when Abu Sayyaf had claimed 
responsibility for a bomb planted aboard a Philippine Airlines flight from Manila to Tokyo 
that had killed a passenger and injured six others, Philippine officials did not take its 
claim seriously, thinking Abu Sayyaf was just an indigenous band of criminals. This 
rather casual opinion dramatically changed when police, peeling the evidentiary onion, 
began to realize that Abu Sayyaf was an extensive sophisticated Islamist movement of 
which Al Qaeda was only a part, albeit the most dangerous one. In June 1994 the police 
launched Operation Blue Marlin designed to find jihadists and expose their revolutionary 
organizations, and in the years that followed Philippine police and army were able to 
piece together the cultural, religious, economic, and political organizations devoted to 
the creation of an Islamic state in the southern Philippines. It also opened a new vista on 
the old and the new revolutionaries. The old radicals were the Moro Islamic Liberation 
Front (MILF), originally known as the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which in 
the early 1970s had started a rebellion in the southern Philippines It had continued until 
1983 before subsequent negotiations led to a series of peace agreements between the 
various separatist factions and the central government in Manila. The new Islamist 
revolutionaries had the same objective, an independent Islamist state in the southern 
Philippines, but its methods were very different, for Abu Sayyaf was quite prepared to 
use any means necessary, including methodical terrorism. 



Moro Islamic Liberation Front 

The jihad in the Philippines was as old as the conflict between Spaniards and 
Philippine Muslims that began when the Spanish Captain Miguel Lopez de Legazpi and 
his four galleons arrived at the island of Cebu in 1565. For the next four hundred years 
the Muslim Moro of the Sulu archipelago and southwestern Mindanao fought against 
non-Muslim foreign rulers, and no central government in Manila ever succeeded in 
imposing complete control over them. Stimulated by the rise of Islamic nationalism, this 
resistance erupted once more in the 1970s. Led by its founder, Nur Misuari, the Moro 
National Liberation Front (MNLF) struggled to establish an independent Islamic state 
comprising Mindanao, Palawan, Basilan, the Sulu archipelago, and the neighboring 
islands. With Libyan mediation Misuari signed the first peace agreement in Tripoli 
between his Muslim separatists and the Philippine government; this led to a split in MNLF 
when Shaykh Salamat Hashim and the traditional leaders refused to accept any 
compromise with the government in Manila On 26 December 1977 Hashim announced 



in Jidda an "Instrument of Takeover'' of the MNLF leadership; Misuari charged him with 
treason. Hashim took refuge in Cairo where he announced the "new MNLF," the Moro 
Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Egypt rallied to Hashim; Qaddafi supported 
Misuari. [3961 

Shaykh Salamat Hashim was born on 7 July 1942 in Pagalungan in the Maguindanao 
region of the Philippines. Inspired by his mother, he could read and had memorized 
much of the Quran at the age of six, graduated with honors from secondary school in 
1958, and joined the Filipino pilgrims on the hajj. He remained in Mecca under the 
tutelage of Shaykh Ayman al-Zawahiri, often called Zawari by Filipino Muslims, while 
attending the halaqat (study group) at the Masjid al-Haram and was a student at the 
Madrasat al-Sulatiya al-Diniyah. The following year he was in Cairo, at that time the 
center of political activism in the Middle East, where he enrolled at Al Azhar University. 
He vigorously pursued his studies, graduating from Al Azhar College of Theology in 
1967 with a bachelor's degree in 'aqida and philosophy. As a postgraduate student he 
was awarded a master's degree in 1969 but abandoned his doctoral studies to return to 
the Philippines to organize the Moro revolutionary movement. During his student years 
in Cairo he had become deeply involved in student politics, which had exposed him to 
the various revolutionary trends that transformed him from Islamic scholar to Islamist 
revolutionary. As President of the Philippine Muslim Student Organization and 
Secretary-General of the larger Organization of Asian Students in Cairo, in the early 
1960s he united a clandestine core of Filipino Muslim students to plan the Bangsamoro 
revolution. It was during these student years that Hashim was profoundly influenced in 
his Islamist thinking by Sayyid Abu al-'Ala al-Maududi and the writings of Sayyid Qutb, 
both of whom shaped his Islamist and radical political beliefs. [3971 

Upon his return to the Philippines in 1970 Hashim became a founding member of 
MNLF and served as second-in-command to Nur Misuari during the talks in 1975-1976 
with the Marcos government. He broke with Misuari in 1977. Thereafter, as amirol the 
Moro Mujahideen and Chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), his goal 
was the establishment of an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines, the 
same as that of the more secular MNLF. Where MILF differed from MNLF was its 
determination that the new Islamic state would be based on Islamist principles in which 
its leaders would be Islamist clerics, like Salamat Hisham, who had committed 
themselves to the complete submission to the Will of Allah in strict conformity to the 
teachings of the Quran and the Sunna. Whereas MNLF had accepted the secular 
Philippine constitution and cooperated with the Philippine government, MILF refused to 
recognize that constitution and carried on its insurgency in what Hashim called "the 
longest and bloodiest struggle for freedom and self-determination in the entire history of 
mankind. " [3981 

The members of MILF of Maguindanaon and Iranun ethnicity were concentrated in the 
thirteen Muslim-dominated provinces, four cities, and Mindanao. Their leaders, whom 
Hashim had brought with him at the time of the split with MNLF, were conservative 
Muslim scholars from traditional and aristocratic families. As soon as he had returned in 
1970 Hashim helped establish a string of Bangsamoro training-camps for the first 
fighting cadres, who would later become the military core of the MILF. Years later 
Shaykh Hashim openly admitted that Bin Laden sent financial support to MILF, and in 
return MILF provided a safe haven for Afghan-Arab veterans of the Afghan war. It also 
supplied a training site for members of the Algerian GIA. MILF was soon granted 
observer status in OIC, and that organization provided generous infusions of funds to 



build the necessary infrastructure for "regional self-reliance." For the first time zakat 
(zakah in Malay) was paid annually throughout the region, and non-Muslims in areas 
controlled by MILF were required to pay the jizya, the head tax required from the kafirin. 
These indigenous resources, in addition to those supplied by Al Qaeda and OIC, 
enabled MILF to launch a wave of terrorist attacks in the southern Philippines during the 
early 1990s. Thereafter, MILF and the central government would negotiate intermittent 
ceasefires, that were regularly broken after a few months. By the late 1990s MILF had 
claimed to have 120,000 mujahideen and another 300,000 militiamen. The government, 
however, estimated the strength of MILF at only 8,000 to 15,000 trained jihadists. 

Fierce engagements were fought in the southern provinces in February and March 
1998. Artillery duels and infantry battles were followed by yet another ceasefire that in 
turn collapsed in May 2000, precipitating a massive assault by the Philippine army 
during which MILF military headquarters, Camp Abubaker, was captured. MILF 
countered with a series of bombings in Manila coordinated with attempts to assassinate 
the Philippine ambassador to Indonesia. [3991 After 9/11 MILF publicly condemned the 
attack and denied having any link with Al Qaeda despite the fact that hundreds of MILF 
members from Mindanao had trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and the leader 
and members of Jammah Islamiyya (Jl), a militant Indonesian group, had received 
training in explosives at MILF camps. When, however, the USA began a joint operation 
with the Philippine army in its war against terror, MILF agreed to yet another ceasefire 
and a commitment to open peace talks. This change of direction was not solely 
motivated by the threat of active American intervention either in the field or at the peace 
table. Prior to the election of November 2001 in the Autonomous Region in Muslim 
Mindinao (ARMM) a pro-Manila faction in the old MNLF ousted Nur Misuari, preventing 
his reelection as Governor. Combatant supporters of Misuari attempted to disrupt the 
polls and assaulted military outposts throughout western Mindanao as part of the 
independence struggle, which was crushed by the army. Misuari was arrested and 
imprisoned. With Misuari behind bars MILF seized this window of opportunity to heal the 
old breach between the two movements in order to present a united front during peace 
negotiations with the government.[400] 



Muhammad Jamal Khalifa 

Two years after Shaykh Salamat Hashim had declared the "new MNLF" and then 
presided over the birth of the MILF in March 1984, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, a Saudi 
mujahid known in Peshawar as Abu Barra and brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, paid 
a visit to Manila. A year later he returned at the request of Bin Laden to provide support 
for the newly formed Abu Sayyaf Group in the southern Philippines. In one important 
aspect Khalifa was much like Osama bin Laden. When Bin Laden operated from 
Peshawar "he received reports of how his money had been spent," and when Khalifa 
operated in Manila he pinched every penny. Unlike Bin Laden, however, whose "desire 
[was] merely to fund charitable and military operations," nothing more, Khalifa was an Al 
Qaeda foot-soldier ready to undertake any mission. [4011 In Manila he did not attract the 
attention of the Philippine police, for he easily disguised his illicit activities in legal 
transactions that could not be traced in the open climate that characterized commercial 
life in Manila. In 1988 he recruited a Filipino, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, to bring 
tough, disciplined leadership to the Abu Sayyaf .[402] By 1991 Khalifa was providing a 



safe haven for Afghan-Arab mujahideen and funding directly or indirectly three 
Philippine Muslim terrorist organizations: MILF, the Abu Sayyaf Group, and the 
Pentagon Group. The latter was little more than a gang of extortionists, "a creation of the 
MILF" used to extract funds for the organization. [4031 

In its Islamist context the Philippine jihad can be dated from 1987 when Muhammad 
Khalifa decided to settle permanently in Manila. There he founded the Khalifah Trading 
Industries Ltd., an export-import front. He married two Filipino women and recruited 
jihadists while devoting his considerable energy to the creation of an Islamist 
infrastructure in Southeast Asia. In 1988 he launched IIRO's Southeast Asia operation 
and served as its Regional Director for Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the 
Philippines. Operating from Marawi City and sheltered by MWL, he opened bank 
accounts from Hong Kong to Thailand. [404] The adept Khalifa was soon administering a 
number of bogus Islamic charities, and at one time or another in his Philippine career 
he represented the legitimate MWL, the Dar ul-Hijra Foundation, and the Islamic Da'wa 
Council of the Philippines. 

Khalifa personally established the Al Imam al-Shafi'i Center, where the most 
conservative of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and the favorite Islamic school 
of law in Southeast Asia, was taught. He also supported the Islamic Students' 
Association, the Mercy International Relief Organization (MIRO), and he founded the Al 
Fatiha Foundation in 1992. In Mindanao he launched the Al Makdum University in 
Zamboanga and assisted Ikhwan charities in Mindanao. Importantly, he also founded 
BIC, a false-front export-import company that was restructured in 1992 as BIF, a 
charity whose real purpose was to attack US interests in the Philippines. Consequently, 
by the time the Bojinka terrorists were uncovered three years later a dozen interlocking 
charities underpinned the Islamist movement in the Philippines. 

Khalifa's genius was organization. His enterprises involved interlocking directorates 
and were essentially transnational. He was extremely careful to see that his financial 
transactions could not be traced to the clandestine Al Qaeda cells in the Philippines. 
Logistical and financial assistance was provided by the International Islamic Alliance of 
Muslim Missionaries and the Al Islamiyya Revolutionary Tabiligh, many of whose 
administrators were from Egypt and Pakistan. Additional support came from the 
Federation of Muslim Student Leaders and the League of Pakistani Islamic Propagation, 
and if difficulties arose Khalifa could always depend on the powerful Saudi Arabian 
Department of External Affairs which represented the global IIRO. Perhaps the most 
important of his many Philippine charities, however, was the Islamic Research and 
Information Center (IRIC). It was established in 1993, with Khalifa as its very active 
CEO, and his Malaysian business partner, a Dr. Zubayr, as Chairman of the Board. 
IRIC was to be the clearing-house for the operations of his other charities, particularly 
the Philippine branch of IIRO. Little was known of Zubayr aside from the fact that he 
arrived in Manila in 1985 and may have been on a reconnaissance for Khalifa. The 
day-to-day management of IRIC and IIRO was the responsibility of Ahmad al-Hamwi 
(aka Abu Omar), a Syrian who had fled Turkey for the Philippines after he was 
suspected in a 1986 bombing. He also helped to establish BIC. 

By 1993 Khalifa was seeking new worlds to conquer. He sold his Manila furniture 
business, and in the following year turned over the administration of IIRO to the learned 
Shaykh Hamoud al-Lahim, another member of the Al Qaeda network and the author of 
The Principles of Islam, published and distributed by IIRO. One of his highest priorities 



was the multi-million-dollar program for mosque construction in Christian-dominated 
Luzon. Funds were tunneled to al-Lahim through the Dar ul-Hijra organization and the 
Islamic Studies for Call and Guidance (ISCAG), a charity of former Filipino workers 
overseas who had converted to Islam in Saudi Arabia, while the costs of mosque and 
madrasa construction were funded by the IDB of Saudi Arabia In 1995 IRIC created 
the satellite Islamic Presentation Committee (IPC) to oversee Islamist "education" in 
regions under rebel control. IPC used a commercial office in Manila, but its 
headquarters were in Kuwait where its first Director-General, Salah al-Rashid, had a 
very close relationship with the Ikhwan movement in that country. The Saudi-sponsored 
Mercy International Relief Organization (MIRO) was yet another charity about whose 
activities in the Philippines little was known until the bombings in 1998 of the US 
embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi revealed that it had smuggled weapons and 
delivered false passports for Al Qaeda. Finally, when Khalifa required legal advice and 
services, which was quite often, he could depend on the Islamic Wisdom Worldwide 
mission, funded by MWL and IIRO, to provide legal services and bail money. The 
Mission also published the Wisdom Journal, financed a popular radio program, and was 
a regular fundraiser for MILF. 

The peripatetic Muhammad Jamal Khalifa was also closely connected with the 
Bangsamoro Youth League (BYL), an important conduit between activists in the field 
and IIRO. BYL programs included Islamic indoctrination, dissemination of political 
propaganda, da\ia, social work, and community development. It filled the vacuum 
created by the absence of social services in the southern Philippines. [4051 Founded by 
the Bangsamoro Council (majlis al-shura) in 1993, its fifty-one members, many of whom 
had fought in Afghanistan, promoted unity among the thirteen tribes of the Bangsamoro. 
Its funds came largely from the annual collection of zakah al-fitr and zakah al-anwal, and 
from contacts it had made in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan, and with the Palestine 
HAMAS BYL provided funds for madrasas, built fortified Islamic communities, and 
helped support many of the 7,000 Bangsamoro da\va missionaries. It recruited jihadists 
for both MILF and Abu Sayyaf and by 1998 had opened its own military academy. 

In 1994 Muhammad Jamal Khalifa traveled to the USA with an associate, Mohammed 
Loay Bayazid, an Al Qaeda agent who had previously tried to purchase uranium. The 
true purpose of his visit remains unclear, but Bayazid, who had joined Osama bin Laden 
in the Sudan and then became President of BIF in 1992, was also a member of the Al 
Qaeda hierarchy. Two years before, in September 1992, Ramzi Yousef and Ahmad Ajaj 
had flown to the USA, where they were stopped at customs and a search of their 
luggage uncovered several manuals on how to make bombs. The literature was marked 
with the name of Abu Barra, Khalifa's Peshawar pseudonym. A year later one of his 
business cards was found among the belongings of the blind Shaykh Omar Abd 
al-Rahman, who helped execute the bombing of the World Trade Center. Then, in 1994, 
Ramzi Yousef and a team of terrorists moved to Manila with funds provided by Osama 
bin Laden and tunneled through Khalifa and his IRIC. Thereafter, the terrorists were in 
frequent contact with Khalifa by cell-phones monitored by US authorities Not 
surprisingly, he was arrested in December while waiting at the San Francisco airport for 
his return flight to Manila The FBI found enough incriminating evidence - manuals for 
bomb-making and terrorist-training, and telephone numbers for Ramzi Yousef, members 
of his gang, and Osama bin Laden - in his belongings. In January 1995, when the 
smoke cleared from the apartment fire in Manila, the terrorists' hard-drives exposed 
additional and damaging evidence of Khalifa's ties to terrorism. It was not a crime in the 



USA simply to be in possession of bomb-making manuals. However Khalifa had 
previously been tried in absentia and convicted of terrorism in Jordan. In 1989 he had 
opened the Al Imam al-Shafi'i Center at the urging of Abdailah Kamil Abdullah, a 
Jordanian jihadist, who was longing for a safe haven from which he could plan attacks 
on the Hashemite Kingdom. The USA acceded to the requests of the Jordanian 
government for his extradition. Tried once again in Amman, his first conviction was 
overturned when a previous key witness recanted, and Khalifa was found innocent and 
released. 

Although Khalifa's troubles in California forced him to relinquish his position in the 
IIRO-Philippines office, he returned occasionally and was often seen elsewhere in 
Southeast Asia. In 1998 "under the umbrella organization of the Muslim World League," 
he founded and administered IIRO's Southeast Asia operations from Marawi City. [4061 
In addition he was the Regional Director for Indonesia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the 
Philippines until the organization decentralized and offices were opened elsewhere in 
Southeast Asia By the time of his return to Southeast Asia the relationship between his 
Islamic charities and MILF and Abu Sayyaf revolutionary movements had become 
thoroughly intertwined. It was the persistent detective work of National Police officer 
Rodolfo Bauzon Mendoza, Jr. that eventually established the linkage between 
Muhammad Jamal Khalifa and the various terrorist organizations operating in the 
Philippines. 14071 Consequently, when Shaykh al-Lahim began to have problems with the 
Philippine authorities, he moved most of the Philippine IIRO operations to Saudi Arabia 
where he could deal directly with donors, and when they began to question how their 
money was spent in the Philippines, al-Lahim accompanied them to the ISCAG office 
and "showed them around." Meanwhile, the Philippine police were convinced that 
ISCAG was an Islamist front, and although the work of its charities included the 
establishment of Islamic communities, madrasas, and Islamic centers, its funds were 
"channeled towards the propagation of Islamic terrorist activities. " [4081 As for 
Muhammad Jamal Khalifa, after 9/11 he was placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia 
where, after an investigation of his affairs, he was allowed to go free after reportedly 
distancing himself from Osama bin Laden. He reappears from time to time to give 
interviews proclaiming his innocence before the media. 



Abu Sayyaf Group 

In 1986 the Philippines had only one significant insurrectionist movement, the 
separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The Islamic community, which probably 
numbered some 5 million people, was generally passive and massively outnumbered by 
Christians in a nation of 60 million Filipinos. The creation of Abu Sayyaf (Ar. "Bearer of 
the Sword") in 1986 dramatically introduced a change in the rebel Islamic movement. 
Abu Sayyaf was predominantly a mixture of Philippine students educated in Egypt and 
mujahideen, who had either served under or were recruited by the Afghan warlord 
Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf (aka Abu Sayyaf, leader in Afghanistan of the Ittihad-i-lslami). 
After the end of the war in Afghanistan members of the group, some of whom had 
served in the International Islamic Brigade, the name first used in Afghanistan to 
describe what later came to be known as Al Qaeda, returned to the Philippines where 
more than a thousand Filipino jihadists would continue the struggle begun in 
Afghanistan. Among the first to arrive home was Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani from 



Basilan Island, a Libyan-trained Islamic preacher recruited by Muhammad Jamal 
Khalifa. Janjalani had received his guerrilla training in Syria and Libya and was already 
a well-known Peshawar Afghan-Arab and a member of the Executive Council of the 
International Islamic Brigade. Osama bin Laden himself was believed to have visited the 
Abu Sayyaf base in the Philippines, and if he did not personally order Janjalani to join 
Khalifa, he must certainly have approved of it. 

Janjalani quickly established a close association with MILF. He incorporated into Abu 
Sayyaf many Filipinos who had worked in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, where they had 
converted to Islam before returning home. The pool was large, and by 1990 some 
50,000 Filipinos had become Muslims of the Wahhabi faith. Most had participated in the 
Balik-lslam program, which derived its funds from local Saudi charities and zakat where 
they were active. Muslim employers often gave "zakat to employees who are converts," 
and numerous Filipino workers found that if they converted to Islam they need not return 
to the Philippines when their lucrative contracts expired. [4091 Those Muslim converts 
who did return to the Philippines formed their own organization, the Fi Sabilillah, and 
received support from Muhammad Jamal Khalifa's Islamic charities - ISCAG, the Dar 
ul-Hijra, which operated under a variety of names, the Islamic Center, and Islamic 
Wisdom Worldwide. All were registered charities in the Philippines; all were used to 
funnel funds to MNLF, MILF, and Abu Sayyaf; all had the same aims: da\va and jihad 
Balik-lslam had its own military units, and its members were the directors of at least six 
radical organizations. Fi Sabilillah produced radio and television shows, and it publicly 
admitted that much of its funding came from overseas donations. 

Under the leadership of Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani Abu Sayyaf, often called Al 
Harakatal-lslamiyya, became operational sometime in 1989. Muhammad Jamal Khalifa 
served as "adviser to an eight-man core group" that composed its executive council, and 
the Philippine IIRO reportedly "shouldered the logistics needed" by Abu Sayyaf. [4 101 
Abu Sayyaf and Janjalani established their headquarters in Zamboanga City on 
Mindanao By December 1990 Janjalani was preaching, winning supporters in the 
Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi islands, and recruiting young jihadists to join the Islamist 
revolt. In January 1991 Abu Sayyaf carried out its first operation. In response to 
Saddam Hussein's "call to all Muslims and Arabs around the world to launch a jihad 
against western and Israeli targets," two Iraqi operatives attacked the Thomas Jefferson 
Cultural Center in Makati City. By then Abu Sayyaf had ended its dependence on MILF, 
perhaps because it was not sufficiently ruthless and revolutionary and had failed to 
operate its own camps and establish "international linkages for training, finance, and 
other matters. " [41 11 Another attack on a Philippine military post was soon followed by 
the arrival of a number of Afghan-Arabs, including Ramzi Yousef who was seen at the 
Al Madina Camp in 1992. His plan to attack Pope John Paul II "was conceptualized" 
during his second visit with Abu Sayyaf, in 1993. 

During the early years of Abu Sayyaf, Muhammad Jamal Khalifa made certain that 
donations from sources in the Gulf were used to finance the group despite the fact that 
there was only one Islamic bank in the Philippines, and it was notoriously unreliable. 
The Philippine Amanah Bank, established in 1973 by presidential decree, was a feeble 
response to the growing Muslim unrest in the South. When Khalifa arrived in the 
Philippines, its headquarters in Zamboanga City had few important overseas contacts 
and only a small office in metropolitan Manila. It used both western and Islamic banking 
practices but devoted what resources it possessed to the development of Mindanao, 
Palawan, and islands in the Sulu chain. Like other Philippine banks its activity was 



scrutinized closely by the government, which held 60 percent of its shares, inhibiting 
any laundering of large sums of money. Thus, without the presence of a dependable 
international bank or widespread use of the hawala system, where transactions could be 
disguised or even hidden, Khalifa was forced to use Al Qaeda couriers who traveled 
regularly throughout Southeast Asia. In order to provide the necessary support for Abu 
Sayyaf to establish a base on Basilan Island or on Mindanao, Khalifa used IIRO to open 
the Zamboanga Islamic Institute of the Philippines, which then employed many 
Palestinians with Jordanian passports. Elsewhere on the island IIRO opened three 
branch offices, including an important one at Davao City, where several Jordanian, 
Pakistani, and Kuwaiti Islamists and bomb-making experts were employed. One of the 
Pakistani jihadists served as the titular head of all madrasas in the Philippines. 

In 1992 Abu Sayyaf attempted to destroy the MV Doulous, an international floating 
bookstore manned by Christian preachers. The explosion, which injured several people, 
was followed by a series of bombings at the Zamoanga airport and Roman Catholic 
churches. The following year they detonated a bomb in the cathedral in Davao City, 
killing seven worshipers. During that same year Abu Sayyaf, seeking ever more funds 
to expand its operations, began kidnapping people for ransom. A linguist for the 
Summer Institute of Linguistics in the USA, Charles Walton, was held for nearly a month 
until an undisclosed sum of money was paid. In 1994 three Spanish nuns and a 
Spanish priest were taken in separate incidents and ransomed. In April 1995, Abu 
Sayyaf achieved the notoriety that had previously eluded it by a particularly brutal attack 
on the predominantly Christian town of Ipil in Mindanao The jihadists razed the town 
center to the ground, terrorized its residents, and killed fifty-three civilians and soldiers. 
That massacre prompted editor-in-chief Marites Daguilan Vitug of the Manila journal 
Newsbreak to launch a personal crusade against this Muslim Islamist terrorist 
organization. [412] 

On 2 September 1996 the government and MNLF signed a peace agreement in Tripoli 
that led to the cessation of hostilities and the creation of the Autonomous Region in 
Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), comprising fourteen provinces and nine cities. MNLF 
renounced its struggle for an independent Moro state, and many MNLF armed units 
were integrated into the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). Nur Misuari, the 
founder and Chairman of the original MNLF, was made Chairman of the Philippine 
Council for Peace and Development and then won the election for Governor of 
ARMM. [4131 This agreement, granting home rule to the southern Philippines, was 
strongly opposed by Christian politicians from Mindanao and Abu Sayyaf who hoped to 
sabotage autonomy by continuing to fight the AFP for independence. [414] A definitive 
ceasefire agreement was signed in 1997, but negotiations over the details of the 
regional autonomy proceeded very slowly. 

In 1998 Abu Sayyaf suffered two major setbacks - the loss of IIRO funding and the 
death of Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani. In August 1998 Janjalani was killed in a firefight 
with police in the village of Lamitan on Basilan Island. The loss was far more than his 
organizational and military skills, for he had the charisma and rhetoric to define the 
Islamist religious and political goals, which were now lost in place of terrorist practices 
that soon degenerated into brutal banditry. Abu Sayyaf appeared a spent force until 
subsidies from abroad were resumed in 2000. Despite the dearth of funds, however, its 
offices in the Philippines had continued to provide safe houses for Islamist jihadists, 
specifically those entering the Philippines illegally from Malaysia. [41 51 



After a short internal struggle, Abu Sayyaf was reorganized by Janjalani's brother, 
Qaddafi Janjalani, also an Afghan-Arab. Its nucleus remained the Filipino Muslims who 
had fought or were trained in Afghanistan and which were now led by the ruthless 
Ghalib Andang (aka Commander Robot). [416] Robbery, piracy, and kidnapping for 
ransom now became its chief means to acquire cash for guns. In April 2000 
Commander Robot struck as far afield as Malaysia, seizing 140 hostages at a Malaysian 
diving resort. To secure their release, the governments of Malaysia, Libya, Germany, 
and France paid Abu Sayyaf millions of dollars. On 30 December Abu Sayyaf terrorists 
exploded a bomb in the Manila metro. In 2001 they kidnapped three Americans and 
seventeen Filipinos in the Philippines, again from a resort where two of the American 
hostages and one Filipino died The attacks confirmed the decision by the government 
not to include Abu Sayyaf in the negotiations concluded in Kuala Lumpur in August 
2001 where President Gloria Arroyo signed yet another ceasefire with MILF. The two 
sides agreed to work jointly to "further Muslim autonomy in the southern islands," and 
Libya, Indonesia, and Malaysia were to act as monitors. [41 71 After 9/11 when Abu 
Sayyaf was placed on the US and UN terrorist lists, Manila made it very clear to MILF 
that it would honor the ceasefire with them, but it would not abandon its determination to 
destroy Abu Sayyaf. The USA offered, and the Philippines approved, the use of 
American military advisers to assist in eliminating Abu Sayyaf from their stronghold on 
Basilan Island, but no direct US military action in Southeast Asia as part of the war on 
terror was contemplated at that time. 

In November 2001 the Philippine government intensified its investigation of its Islamists 
by launching Operation Green Veil against Abu Sayyaf. Once again Filipino security 
agents confirmed their belief that Al Qaeda was recruiting Muslim terrorists "through a 
network of [Islamic] charities." During the early months of 2002 some members of Fi 
Sabilillah who had become jihadists were arrested in Manila, including a terrorist who 
had planted a bomb on a ferry that killed more than a hundred people. [418] In January 
the Philippine police arrested Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, an Indonesian terrorist who had 
masterminded a spate of bombings throughout metropolitan Manila. Al-Ghozi (aka 
Randy Ali) was not only a key member of the MILF Special Operations Group but a 
leader of Jammah Islamiyya (Jl), the Muslim militant group linked to Al Qaeda that 
operated in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. In the Philippines al-Ghozi had been 
assisted by Hadji Onos (aka Muklis), a MILF member, and an Indonesian named Riduan 
Isamuddin (or Encep Nurjaman), better known as Hambali. Al-Ghozi's capture led to a 
major weapons cache and opened a trail to Hambali. Hambali, often called "the Osama 
Bin Laden of Southeast Asia," was known to have used a Kuala Lumpur condominium 
belonging to a former Afghan-Arab to plan Jl terrorist attacks. [419] 

Meanwhile, the AFP offensive against Abu Sayyaf strongholds in the south was equally 
damaging to the Islamists, and in two years the Philippine army had reduced the 
number of terrorists from "a few thousand to fewer than 400. "[420] On the defensive in 
Basilan Island, Abu Sayyaf retaliated with terrorist attacks in Manila, and it was joined 
by a little-known group, the Rajah Sulaiman Movement, planning terrorist attacks on the 
Christian-dominated island of Luzon in the north, presumably to divert attention from 
their defeats in the predominantly Muslim south. [42 11 The government had obtained 
substantial information from an Egyptian Al Qaeda member and "Muslim missionary," 
Hassan Mustafa Bakre, who had entered the Philippines from Malaysia in 1999. 
Captured in Maguindanao early in 2004 he admitted teaching bombing techniques to 
some 500 Islamist students at a MILF camp in Mindanao. He had numerous 



accomplices, including seven Indonesians and five Egyptians. In June 2004 the 
government gave MILF six months to get rid of Jl terrorist entanglements and expel the 
thirty Jl terrorists known to be using MILF bases in Mindanao. If MILF refused to 
comply, it could very well ignite the civil war that had been moribund for years, which 
would likely provoke the USA to add MILF to its list of designated foreign terrorist 
organizations. By then there were good reasons to end the conflict in the southern 
Philippines. A Multi-Donor Trust Fund created by the World Bank and sponsored by the 
United States Agency for International Development (AID), IDB, OPEC, and the 
governments of Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Japan totaling $3.75 
billion in grants would become available once a definitive peace accord had been 
signed by MILF and the Philippine government. 

After 9/11 the Philippine authorities began a closer surveillance on some forty Islamic 
organizations that led to the capture in December 2003 of Commander Robot. His arrest 
and the death of his key officers in Abu Sayyaf gave Qaddafi Janjalani the opportunity 
to recover control of jihadists and restore Abu Sayyaf to its original political goal of an 
independent Islamist state, which had become subsumed by wanton banditry. Qaddafi 
and his core followers left the traditional Abu Sayyaf boondocks in the Sulu archipelago 
and on Basilan Island for the Mindanao mainland. This was still the home turf of MILF 
and its Chairman, al-Hajj Murad Ebrahim. He had succeeded Shaykh Salamat Hashim 
upon his death from cardiac arrest on 13 July 2003 in a Mindanao MILF military training 
camp. Ebrahim was determined to negotiate a peace with the government before the 
increasing numbers of unemployed and dissatisfied young Muslims succumbed to the 
greater radicalism of Abu Sayyaf. "Once they see some hope, then they will think twice 
before joining groups that advocate suicide bombing and so on. But when they believe 
there is no future, they will go to Abu Sayyaf." The leaders of Abu Sayyaf, of course, 
believed the opposite, that if peace was made with the government, they would inherit 
the young Muslim firebrands of the southern Philippines. "If this sell-out succeeds, more 
blood will flow because the young are more determined jihadists. We will soon find out 
there are more Osama bin Ladens in our midst."[422] Neither of these predictions has 
come to pass. Abu Sayyaf continued its terrorist attacks despite its shrinking numbers, 
and Qaddafi Janjalani was reportedly killed in an air raid on 19 November 2004 while 
meeting with members of J I at Datu Piang in southern Mindanao. 



Malaysia 

While Muhammad Jamal Khalifa was busy creating an Al Qaeda network in the 
Philippines, in Khartoum Osama bin Laden and Hasan al-Turabi were preparing to 
export Islamist ideology to Malaysia. Both men had close ties with the country. The Bin 
Laden Group of Saudi Arabia had substantial interests in Malaysia, investing in large 
aquaculture projects in Kedah, the home of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed. Al 
Qaeda operatives used Malaysia as a safe haven, and Osama bin Laden himself had 
visited it several times. He invested in a Malaysian bank, and "bought a few houses and 
apartments. " [4231 Hasan al-Turabi also had close ties to Mahathir and contacts with 
Darul Arqan, an incipient Islamist movement whose investment practices were similar to 
those of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Sudan. In 1994 an imperious Mahathir suddenly 
shut down the movement he could not control. 

Muhammad Jamal Khalifa also had "legitimate business concerns" in Malaysia, 



including a bottled-water enterprise and an import-export company. He had a plethora 
of contacts among local business concerns, one of which, the Konsojaya Trading 
Company of Kuala Lumpur, provided yet another bogus import-export front. Konsojaya, 
founded in June 1994 by Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali), tunneled funds to 
Muhammad Jamal Khalifa's IRIC office in the Philippines - funds that were then used to 
support Ramzi Yousef and Operation Bojinka. 
After the death of Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani in the Philippines, and under 
increasing pressure from AFP in Mindanao, Qaddafi Janjalani expanded Abu Sayyaf 
operations into neighboring Malaysia. He formed a close relationship with the Malaysian 
Moujahedeen Group (aka the Kumpulan Mujahideen Malaysia, KMM), and with the 
Laskar Jihad (LJ) of Indonesia, founded in 1998. MILF had established strong ties with 
jihadists in Malaysia, but neither Abu Sayyaf nor MILF sought to launch terrorist attacks 
against the Mahathir government. 14241 Malaysia was more important as a safe haven. 
Still, Malaysia had its own rapidly growing indigenous Salafist Islamist movement. The 
demands of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam SeMalaysia) for an Islamic 
state could only lead to a split between the Islamist community and the large non-Muslim 
minority, which included substantial Chinese and Indian minorities, in the dominant 
United Malays National Organization. 

The evolution of the Malaysian Islamist movement owed much to the Islamic school in 
Sungei Tiram that was the home of the Indonesian exile Abu Bakar Bashir (aka Abu 
Samad). Bashir was a militant Islamist teacher who had first achieved prominence as an 
instructor in the Al Mukmin Islamic boarding school located at Solo in Central Java, 
which had graduated many Islamist jihadists. Its most notorious graduates were the 
Indonesian cleric Riduan Isamuddin (Hambali) and Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi. Hambali, 
the son of a peasant farmer, was born on 4 April 1966 in Cianjur in the rice belt of 
Pamokolan. He was a serious student at his Islamic high school. In 1987 he traveled to 
Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, where he became close friends with Osama bin Laden. 
He joined Al Qaeda, and after the war he envisaged building an Islamist caliphate that 
would embrace all of Southeast Asia, and even northern Australia. Making his 
headquarters in Sungei Tiram in 1991 along with Abu Bakar Bashir and Abdullah 
Sungkar, he founded Jl. He was a close friend of Muhammad Jamal Khalifa and used 
his money to establish an import-export shell company, Konsojaya, in Manila in 1994, in 
which Wali Khan Amin Shah, the financier of Operation Bojinka, was a member of the 
board of directors. As early as 1993 Hambali had become Al Qaeda's director for 
Southeast Asia. He established cells in Indonesia and Singapore as early as 1993 and 
later organized others in the Philippines and Malaysia. "Some funding was obtained 
locally but much came from Al Qaeda. " [4251 

In Malaysia Hambali supported terrorists and helped fund J I by collecting hundreds of 
thousands of dollars through the Pertubuhan al-Ehasan, a charitable institution he 
created in 1998 Police investigating the charity would later find that in one instance 
$210,000 "from unsuspecting Malaysians and others all over the world who thought the 
money was to help needy Muslims" was sent to support the activities of J I. [4261 Other 
funds were obtained through charities to buy weapons, send recruits to Afghanistan and 
the southern Philippines for military training, and to support Muslim assaults on 
Christians in Ambon, Indonesia. Charitable funds were also used to finance a safe 
house for terrorists in Karachi, bomb a train station in Manila, and provide money and 
documents for Zacarias Moussaoui, a conspirator in the 9/1 1 attack. [4271 

After 9/11, the Malaysian government began to investigate Jl and its relationship to Al 



Qaeda. In January 2002 police arrested members of the KMM that had links to Zacarias 
Moussaoui and were in contact with him when he was in Malaysia during 
September-October 2000. KMM, founded in early 1999, included numerous 
Afghan-trained jihadists who had long-standing ties with Al Qaeda. [4281 From a series 
of safe houses throughout Southeast Asia, particularly one in Auytthaya forty-five miles 
north of Bangkok, Hambali planned a terrorist attack on the Asia-Pacific Economic 
Cooperation (APEC) summit to be held in October 2003 when twenty-one heads of 
state, including President George W. Bush, would meet in Bangkok. On 11 August the 
Thai police and the CIA, after twenty months on his trail, tracked him to his apartment in 
Auytthaya, where he was seized along with explosives and firearms. At the age of 
thirty-seven he was imprisoned in a secret location in the USA. 

During their investigations into Jl and Hambali the FBI and Malaysian agents 
discovered that a former Malaysian minister had contributed $10 million to an Islamic 
organization in the USA. In February 2002 the Chairman of the Islamic Supreme 
Council of America, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, claimed that an Islamic 
institution operating in the USA had received such a sum from a Malaysian cabinet 
minister. Shaykh Kabbani, a Naqshabandi Sufi shaykh, added that the organization, 
which was not named, had been involved "in extremist movements in the US and 
abroad," and that the relationship had aroused American suspicions that a member of 
the Malaysian government was involved in terrorist activities. [4291 The announcement 
created a firestorm of criticism in Malaysian political circles, and demands were made 
that Kabbani be "deported" to Malaysia to substantiate his allegations. The Shaykh was 
also challenged by other American Muslim institutions with which he had a running feud 
While the storm raged American investigators dug deeper to discover wire transfers 
between Moussaoui and members of a Malaysian Jl cell associated with Al Qaeda. [4301 
The Malaysian investigations of Islamic charities soon expanded to include the Wisdom 
Enrichment Foundation (WEFOUND), the Islamic University College of Malaysia, and 
the Regional Islamic Dawah Council of Southeast Asia and the Pacific (RISEAP), only 
to find that none appeared to have links with terrorist organizations. Founded in 1981 
with headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, RISEAP had achieved renown by sponsoring 
conferences throughout the region. The Malaysian government had maintained a strong 
presence in the organization, and the Chief Minister of Sarawak, Malaysia, had served 
as its President. RISEAP received substantial support from the WEFOUND, yet another 
Saudi charity and a non-profit Islamic organization with a global Wahhabi mission. 
WEFOUND supported and organized international seminars, including the International 
Council for Islamic Information Dawah Workshops held in the Philippines for 
representatives from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea, and Sri Lanka. From June 
1999 WEFOUND operated its own global e-mail network, disseminating free articles and 
lessons on da\ia. It worked in conjunction with both WAMY and the International 
Council for Islamic Information (ICII) in Leicestershire in the UK. 

Despite Prime Minister Mahathir's political struggles to retain the secular state, 
characterized by a thriving multi-ethnic business community, he was unable to contain 
the expanding influence of the Islamists. The Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, Malaysia's 
largest opposition party, declared in 2003 its goal of creating an Islamic state, "with 
punishments such as stoning and amputation for criminals and a ban on non-Muslims 
becoming prime minister." [431l The party controlled the local government in Trengannu 
and Kelantan, two of Malaysia's thirteen states, but had little chance of controlling the 
national government despite its widespread influence among the Muslim Malay 



community. Nevertheless, after 9/11 many observers were convinced that Southeast 
Asia had "now become even more important to al Qaeda's money men . . . where 
money continues to flow to the terror group through hawala networks." Although ten 
Malaysian firms controlled by Jl "donate 10% of their revenue into the Infaq Sabilallah - 
Jihad fund," the Malaysian government has been reluctant to "cooperate with the United 
States in tackling" these firms or other charities or other Al Qaeda fronts including the 
Om al Qura Foundation, a charity that "established money-laundering fronts in 
orphanages and nursery schools in Malaysia. " [4321 



Indonesia 

When gathering intelligence on terrorists and their financial ties with Islamic charities 
in the 1990s, Philippine police discovered many ties between the Islamist jihadists in the 
southern Philippines and an emerging Salafist movement in Indonesia. That came as no 
surprise, for the best-selling author V. S Naipaul had warned of this emerging 
phenomenon in Among the Believers, published in 1981. [4331 At the time the police did 
not identify any specific operations involving Islamists from Indonesia and the 
Philippines, but the Indonesian origins of Jl and its leaders, Hambali and Abu Bakar 
Bashir, were well known to the authorities. Dar ul-lslam, an early Indonesian Islamist 
movement, shifted its operations to Malaysia in 1993 and adopted Jl . At the turn of the 
millennium Jl had gained significant influence in more than 140 religious boarding 
schools. It assisted the Moro rebels in the southern Philippines, planned to bomb the 
American embassy in Singapore, and when that target was not considered sufficiently 
large, a US ship. Until 9/11, however, Indonesian and Malaysian authorities had 
categorized J I as a loosely structured clandestine gathering of like-minded Southeast 
Asian Islamists. They had not understood the depth of their fanaticism, although Bashir 
had frequently called the US "the number one enemy of Indonesia" and encouraged 
Muslims to carry out jihad "if they believe Christians are attacking Muslims." [4341 

Less known was the Indonesian Laskar Jihad (Holy War Militia, LJ), with its 
headquarters at Degolan north of the resort town of Jogjakarta in Java. Its leader, Ustad 
(Professor) Ja'afar Umar Thalib, had left the Mawdudi Institute in Lahore, Pakistan, in 
1988 to join the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan until their withdrawal in 
1989. In 2000 this veteran of the Afghan war assumed the leadership of LJ, which 
served as the military wing of the Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah (Sunni 
Communication Forum, FKAWJ). The Forum, founded by Salafists in 1998 and 
dedicated to the promotion of "true Islamist values," had an estimated 10,000 jihadists in 
2003. LJ was known to have links "with many terrorist outfits and Islamist fundamentalist 
organizations based in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan," and its website 
demonstrated "striking similarities" to those produced by other Islamist organizations. Jl 
was especially active in the Moluccas, in which Bin Laden had become interested, and 
may have been responsible for the significant number of Afghan-Arabs involved with LJ 
forces in their raids on Christian communities. 

Critics have regularly condemned Saudi Arabia for the large infusion of Saudi riyals in 
support of Wahhabi projects in Southeast Asia that have only brought trouble to 
Indonesia. An especially contentious establishment has been the Educational Institution 
of Indonesia-Saudi Arabia in Jakarta. It provides a free five-year education to those 



who accept the strict Wahhabi regimen, and talented students are guaranteed free 
scholarships to continue their education in Saudi Arabia. The school is seen as the 
spearhead of Wahhabi influence in the world's most populous Muslim country, which 
until the 1990s was "famously relaxed" about the practice of Islam. Consequently, Saudi 
Arabia was perceived as playing a surreptitious role in Indonesian society under the 
guise of providing "above-board funds for religious and educational purposes" while it 
"quietly disbursed funds for militant Islamic groups." One critic bitterly complained that 
"Saudi money has had a profound effect on extremist groups, allowing some to keep 
going and inspiring others to start recruiting. "[435] The Al Haramain Foundation 
provides an illustration of this overt/covert duality. It signed an agreement with the 
Indonesian Ministry of Religion in 2002 that allowed it to finance educational institutions, 
and when once approved used the Foundation to funnel funds to JL 

The extent of Salafist influence in Indonesia became increasingly clear in January 
2002 when Philippine police arrested Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, who was suspected of a 
rash of bombings in Indonesia. Although living in the Philippines since 1996, al-Ghozi 
not only worked with MILF but was a leader of Jl militants in Indonesia, and "the main 
recruiter of Filipino members for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network." He carried six 
passports, but was thought to be a Canadian citizen. On 18 July 2003 he escaped from 
the Camp Crane prison, only to be shot three months later at a police checkpoint in 
Cotabato City. In March 2001 the authorities at Manila's international airport intercepted 
Agus Dwikarna carrying a suitcase filled with C4 explosives; he was tried, convicted, 
and given ten years in prison. Dwikarna was an Al Qaeda operative and the 
representative of the Al Haramain Foundation in Makassar, Indonesia, were he had 
established a terrorist training camp and led the Laskar Jundullah, an Islamist jihadist 
movement on Sulawesi Island. In June 2000 he had been training members of Al Qaeda 
cells in Spain and was in frequent contact with Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of 
the 9/11 hijackers. He and Omar al-Faruq had served as guides to Ayman al-Zawahiri 
during the Egyptian's stay in Indonesia in 2000 in what was subsequently regarded as 
"part of a wider strategy of shifting the base of Osama bin Laden's terrorist operation 
from the Subcontinent to South East Asia. " [4361 

The following month Omar al-Faruq was arrested in Indonesia. Called Al Qaeda's 
"point man in Southeast Asia," he confessed that a branch of the Al Haramain 
Foundation was responsible for funding Al Qaeda operations in the region and that 
"money was laundered through the foundation by donors from the Middle East." [4371 
Stung by the arrest of a string of Islamist radicals and buffeted by the rising Islamist tide 
that was particularly conspicuous in the Moluccas and Sulawesi, the Indonesian 
parliament rejected an attempt by Islamist politicians to impose Shari'a throughout 
Indonesia; this would have precipitated a sea-change in a nation of 220 million people, 
composed of 350 ethnic groups, who had mostly accommodated themselves to one 
another and to Islam. Although Indonesia was 87 percent Muslim there were still 25 
million non-Muslims, and any Islamist imposition of Salafist doctrine would have 
disrupted its traditional ethnic and religious harmony. 

After the arrest and interrogation in September 2002 in Singapore of twenty-one 
domestic terrorists, nineteen members of Jl and two from MILF, the Home Ministry 
reported that Hambali, the region's most dedicated terrorist, had organized a number of 
Islamist jihadist groups with roots in five Southeast Asian countries. Hambali had 
personally forged the Rabitatul Mujahideen coalition, "the objective [of which] was to 
unify the Islamic militant groups in the regions, with the ultimate goal of realizing an 



Islamic state comprising Malaysia, Indonesia, and Mindanao, following which Singapore 
and Brunei would eventually be absorbed. "[438] The alliance, three years in the making, 
was led by Hambali and a council that included the leaders of MILF from the Philippines 
and the Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO) from Narathiwat in southern 
Thailand. Meeting secretly three times between 1999 and 2000 they constructed a long 
list of possible targets in Singapore to destroy - four embassies, including that of the 
USA, water pipelines, the Changi airport, a radar station, and a large chemical complex 
on Jurong Island. They also sought to create chaos among the populace by using 
disinformation to set Chinese against Malay. MILF was an indispensable ally for 
Hambali. Since 1997 Jl had paid generous "rent" for the use of its combat training base 
at Abu Bakr camp in Mindanao, and although most of the money came from Islamic 
charities, the Singapore members of Jl "contributed five percent of their salaries to the 
organization," of which half was "to support Jl operations in Malaysia and 
Indonesia. " [4391 

At 11:05 p.m. on 12 October 2002 an electrically triggered bomb exploded in Paddy's 
Bar in Bali, Indonesia. It was followed a few seconds later by a second, more powerful, 
car bomb of ammonium nitrate that was concealed in a white Mitsubishi van outside the 
Sari Club, a popular nightspot. Some 202 customers, including 88 Australian 
holiday-makers, most in their twenties and thirties, were killed and hundreds wounded in 
what has become known as "Australia's September 11." Suspicion of the "worst act of 
terror in Indonesian society" immediately focused on Jl, but Abu Bakar Bashir denied 
any involvement. Although he was never charged over the Bali bombing, he was 
accused in 2003 of plotting to overthrow the government to establish an Islamic state 
and with "attempting to assassinate Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri." He 
was sentenced to four years in prison. 

Indonesian security forces eventually narrowed their search for the assassins to Solo, 
a small town in central Java that was home to Perjalanan Ali Gufron (aka Mukhlas), the 
field commander in the Bali bombing. Gufron had attended the Al Mukmin Islamic 
boarding school in Solo, the madrasa founded in the 1970s "to teach Wahhabi Islam." 
He had continued his education in Malaysia at Abu Bakar Bashir's Islamic school in 
Sungei Tiram and was known to be a close associate of Bashir, who had returned to 
Indonesia in 1999 and to the school at Al Mukmin. [440] He was sentenced to death. His 
accomplice, Amrozi bin Haji Nurhasyim, had purchased the explosives and the van and 
was also sentenced to death. Imam Samudra and Ali Imron expressed remorse for their 
part, which persuaded the judge to commute their sentences to life imprisonment. 

In 2003, under pressure from the USA, the Saudi government ordered the Al Haramain 
Foundation to close all of its overseas offices, including the two-story Al Haramain 
headquarters in a suburb of Jakarta. Closed it was, but the charity quietly moved to a 
smaller house just down the street where it continued to supervise the "completion of the 
charity's expensive new religious boarding school on the outskirts of Jakarta." Saudi 
money continued to flow to Indonesia, and far from Jakarta funds were distributed by 
the Darul Istiqamah al-Haramain in Makassar, and from another office in a small town in 
central Java. [4411 In February 1994 the US Treasury reported that the Al Haramain 
Indonesia office was "either continuing to operate or [had] other plans to avoid these 
measures." The UN also reported that the charity was still active and had just opened its 
Islamic school in Jakarta. Consequently, the Treasury froze the assets of six foreign 
branches of Al Haramain, including its office in Indonesia, and it urged Saudi Arabia to 
close the charity's main office in Saudi Arabia once and for all. "The branches of Al 



Haramain that we have singled out today not only assist in the pursuit of death and 
destruction: they deceive countless people around the world who believe that they have 
helped spread good will and good works. " [4421 Not surprisingly, the Saudis argued that 
if the USA and UN "thought al Haramain is doing something in Indonesia, then it is up to 
the government of Indonesia to take action, not Saudi Arabia." Cynics wondered if Jl 
wanted to create a regional pan-Islamist state (Daulah Islamiyya Raya) by overthrowing 
Southeast Asian governments, which was none of Saudi Arabia's business either. 
Whether by ignorance or design Saudis were certainly using their "charitable" outreach 
to expand a Salafist jihadist influence throughout Southeast Asia. 



Revolt in southern Thailand 

The genesis of the Islamist movement in Thailand was the founding of the Pattani 
United Liberation Organization (PULO) in 1968. Its aim was stark and straightforward: to 
separate by force the four Malay Muslim provinces of southern Thailand. Throughout the 
next two decades there were a number of small bombings and acts of arson by PULO 
rebels. They attacked Buddhist temples, schools, government administrators, and other 
symbols of what they perceived as Thai political and cultural domination. By the early 
1990s PULO seemed a spent force, but many of its Muslim youth had gone to the 
Middle East for their education where they, like so many other young men in the Islamic 
world, were deeply influenced by the war in Afghanistan. Thailand was known "to have 
played host to a plethora of outside religious groupings," including Hizbullah, and 
Islamists from both Bangladesh and India. [4431 Nor had Thailand been ignored by Al 
Qaeda; Ramzi Yousef created a terrorist cell in Bangkok in 1994, where he plotted to 
blow up the Israeli embassy. Moreover, the government of Thailand was willing to spend 
money and military capital to pacify its southern provinces. Members of PULO were 
constantly under surveillance by the police, and their organization, which probably 
never attracted more than three thousand jihadists, was constantly harried by joint 
patrols of Thai and Malay border patrols. 

Despite the best efforts of Thai security forces, however, militant separatism survived. 
About a thousand PULO hardcore remained in hiding, and the demand by the Pattani 
people for self-determination was popular in the towns and cities. Pockets of highly 
radicalized Muslims continued to exist, many of whom had been deeply influenced by 
Wahhabist teachings. In the 1990s PULO began to receive support from transnational 
Islamist terrorists, including Jl, which used Bangkok and southern Thailand as safe 
havens, and the small but persistent KMM. Thailand was the site for the final meeting of 
the terrorists before the Bali bombings in 2002 and the refuge for Hambali prior to his 
capture in Thailand in August 2003 while traveling on a Spanish passport. Despite his 
arrest Thailand continued to serve as a base for J I plotting to bomb tourist sites and five 
western embassies. PULO raids continued in the four southern provinces, including one 
against a Thai army base that left four soldiers dead and more than four hundred 
weapons looted. That act precipitated major firefights between the Thai military and the 
rebels, causing hundreds of casualties. |444l The Thai government placed the blame on 
foreigners and "a flood of funds from Wahhabi fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia. " [4451 
Funds were also traced to the Muslim Salvation Organization of Burma, which operated 
in Chaing Mai, Thailand, and collected funds for the 30,000-50,000 Burmese Muslims 
who had been settled in twenty-eight refugee camps in western Thailand. 



Even the small Muslim Chan community in neighboring Cambodia was infiltrated by 
Islamists. The Om al-Qura Foundation had received "huge inflows of cash" to support Jl 
and Hambali. [4461 In May 2003 the Cambodian authorities closed a Saudi-financed 
madrasa fifteen miles north of Phnom Penh, arrested an Egyptian and two Thais who 
were linked to Jl and the bombings on Bali, and deported twenty-eight teachers and 
dependents from Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, Yemen, and Egypt. In Singapore 
its elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew, warned that terrorists from Thailand to the 
Philippines and Indonesia were still a major threat, and in the months prior to the Bali 
bombings he was particularly concerned about Indonesia, where Islamist jihadists 
moved freely. Yew had reason to be troubled. When coalition forces searched the ruins 
of a bombed Kabul hotel that had housed Al Qaeda members, investigators found a 
twenty-minute surveillance videotape of Singapore that enabled them to unravel "an 
extraordinary series of plots by Jamaat Islamiya," including plans to bomb the "US 
military sites and businesses, diplomatic posts, and the city's subway and water 
supply. " [4471 Singapore arrested thirteen suspected terrorists, and then began a 
crackdown on Muslim institutions and practices, including wearing Islamic headscarves 
(tudung) by girls in schools, and warned parents to avoid those who traveled to Malaysia 
to raise funds for questionable causes. 



Forgotten Bangladesh 



In Southeast Asia the Philippines had become the strategic stepping stone in the 
Islamist infiltration of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, but in South Asia Bangladesh 
was not totally ignored by the Islamists who hoped to make it a stepping stone, albeit a 
lesser one, for the infiltration of Myanmar (Burma) and the half-dozen states of eastern 
India. After the "War of Liberation" from March to December 1971, Pakistani troops 
withdrew from Bangladesh, leaving its provisional government, the Mujibnagar 
government and its president in absentia, Shaykh Mujibur Rahman, to reconstruct a 
devastated country, with a million dead and 10 million refugees. Bangabandu Shaykh 
Mujibur Rahman (1920-1975) had long been the active architect and political leader for 
a separate Bengali state as a student activist in the 1940s. He had been Secretary of 
the East Pakistan Awami Muslim League and member of the East Bengal Legislative 
Assembly as well as the Pakistan Second Constituent Assembly in the 1950s. He also 
wrote his famous six-point program, "Our [Bengalis'] Charter of Survival," which served 
as the declaration of independence from West Pakistan. From 1958 to 1961 and 1966 
to 1969 he had been in and out of prison, followed by his sweeping triumph in the 
general elections of December 1970 that confirmed his status as the spokesman for 
East Pakistan. Under Shaykh Mujibur Rahman the process of Islamization and 
anti-"Hinduism" had gradually evolved in the 1960s, when a program was undertaken to 
replace the Bengali script with Arabic. [4481 The process proceeded gradually under 
Rahman. Despite being labeled a secularist and a traitor to Islam, the first President of 
Bangladesh revived the banned Islamic Academy in 1972 and joined OIC in 1974. 
Following Rahman's assassination in 1975, the Islamic revival continued apace during 
the military regimes of General Ziaur Rahman, "Zia" (1975-1981), and, following his 
assassination in 1981, under General H. M. Ershad (1982-1990). Under Zia the 
constitution was amended, and the centerpiece of a secular society was replaced by 
the words "Absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah shall be the basis of all action." 



General Ershad continued the Islamization of the constitution, making Islam the state 
religion and requiring "Islamiyat" education from the first to the eighth year in the 
schools. [4491 

In 1978 Professor Golam Azam returned to Bangladesh from exile in the UK, carrying 
a British passport. Like Mujibur Rahman he had been a student activist in the 1940s and 
Secretary-General of the Hall Union of the famous Fazlul Haque Muslim Hall at Dhaka 
University, and had played a leading role in the language movement demanding that 
Bangla, not Urdu, become the official language of East Pakistan. While a professor of 
political science in Rangpur Kermichle College, he discovered the political and cultural 
Islamist ideology of "Tamaddun Majlish" and in 1952 founded a branch in Rangpur. He 
did not support the "War of Liberation," wanting autonomy within a unified Pakistan, not 
independence. However, soon after the liberation, when the new government, 
determined to preserve the secular state, began its campaign to uproot Islam, deleting 
the words "Muslim" and "Islamic" from educational institutions, banning Islamic parties, 
and arresting prominent leaders and scholars, Professor Azam was deprived of his 
citizenship and fled into exile in the UK where he played a key role in the establishment 
of Jama'at-i-lslami in Britain. When Zia's government launched its Islamic program, 
Azam returned to Bangladesh, ostensibly to visit his sick mother, where he has lived 
protected by successive Islamic governments and his own "Islamic Guards," despite 
having no citizenship and being a well-known "collaborator." Here in 1991 Golam Azam 
was declared the amir (leader) of the Jama'at-i-lslami of Bangladesh. [4501 

An attempt to establish a political party advocating an Islamic state had been made in 
the early 1930s by Maulana Sayyid Abu al-Ala al-Maududi, but it was not until 25 
August 1941 at a meeting in Lahore that Jama'at-i-lslami was founded, with Maududi as 
its amir. Under his leadership the party had only a modest influence until the outbreak of 
the "War of Liberation" in 1971 when large numbers of government officials began to 
collaborate with the Pakistanis and joined Jama'at-i-lslami to protect their jobs, for they 
expected the separatist Bengali insurgents would be easily crushed. The student wing of 
Jama'at-i-lslami was more ideologically motivated to establish active service units of the 
Al Badr to defend Pakistan and wipe out the Bengali intellectuals. These razakars 
("collaborators") were held responsible for perpetrating thousands of rapes and 
massacres in the name of Islam and for guiding the Pakistani army to places of 
resistance. In order to coordinate this task of seeking out miscreants and Indian agents, 
and to assist the armed forces in destroying them, the Pakistani government formed the 
National Peace Committee. Among its leading members was Golam Azam, who 
repeatedly exhorted the razakars to rid the county of its anti-Pakistani dissidents. During 
the early years of the secular independent Bangladesh the Jama'at-i-lslami was 
banned. In 1979 it was allowed to remain in the open, and when Golam Azam became 
amir in 1991 the movement had won eighteen seats in the Jatiya Sangsad, the 
Bangladesh Parliament. [451l 

Under Professor Azam Jama'at-i-lslami began to receive significant financial support 
from Saudi Arabia for the party's youth organization (Islami Chhatra Shibir, ICS). This 
enabled it to dominate Chittagong University and most of the private madrasas in 
Bangladesh. Funds also arrived for its Islamic Students' Camp, an organization that 
teaches students only Salafist Islamist ideology. The "Arab invasion" led one 
Bangladesh nationalist to declare: "The religious mask of the Arab invader remains 
intact, his sword has been replaced by his abundant cash. Through his subsidies to our 
political parties and their leaders, the Arab sheikh is trying his best to corrupt the top." 



He argued in a vein similar to that heard in the Philippines: "The millions of our 
compatriots employed by the Saudis and their Gulf vassals are daily indoctrinated with 
subtle messages of Arab cultural superiority. Some carry this virus of indoctrination 
back home to their friends, family, and neighbors. "[452] When the Awami League, led 
by Shaykh Hasina Wajed, the daughter of Shaykh Mujibar Rahman, achieved power in 
June 1996, the Salafists of Bangladesh emerged under the aegis of Jama'at-i-lslami. Its 
rapid growth had been abetted by financial support from a number of indigenous 
"pro-Islamist relief organizations," such as the Association of Preaching Islam and 
international organizations including SARCS, Al Haramain, and BIF of the USA. 

When Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa on 23 February 1998 calling for assaults on 
all Americans everywhere, he announced the founding of the International Islamic Front 
for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders. Its signatories included the usual cast of 
terrorist organizations: the EIJ, the Pakistan Scholars/Ulema Society 
(Jama'at-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan), and the Partisans Movement in Kashmir 
(Harkat-ul-Mujahideen). Surprisingly a new name was added to the list, the 
Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-lslami (Jihad Movement of Bangladesh, HUJI) HUJI was founded in 
1992 by Bangladeshis returning from Afghanistan, and, with the aid of Osama bin 
Laden, it would become the most militant Islamist group in Bangladesh and its 
"Bangladeshi Taliban," with some 15,000 members, perpetrated assaults on religious 
minorities, secular intellectuals, and journalists. Its principal recruiting grounds were the 
some 64,000 madrasas - whose students would one day serve as imams for the 
innumerable mosques in Bangladesh - in which they were susceptible to brainwashing 
and made "religious fanatics rather than modern Muslims. " [4531 Its General Secretary, 
Imtiaz Quddus, declared that HUJI would recruit 5,000 mujahideen from the madrasas 
and another 10,000 from the "Rohingyas," Muslim refugees in Myanmar (Burma). The 
latter were trained in guerrilla warfare in the Rohingya Hills of southeastern Bangladesh 
adjacent to Myanmar where HUJI had close ties with the Rohingya Solidarity 
Organization (RSO). [4541 Not only did Osama bin Laden urge the mujahideen to 
infiltrate secular Bangladesh and assist HUJI, but he sent some 150 Al Qaeda jihadi to 
HUJI by ship from Pakistan to hasten the process along. In addition to funds from other 
"Islamic charity groups in Saudi Arabia and the Arab peninsula" for training mujahideen 
Bin Laden himself had personally sent $400,000 to assist some 421 madrasas controlled 
by HUJI. [4551 By 1999 HUJI was involved in scores of bombings, and it was charged 
with two failed assassination attempts on Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 
July 2000. HUJI also had close ties with the Pakistani Harakat-ul-Jihad-al-lslami and 
Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, which were members of Bin Laden's International Islamic Front. 

In the general election of 1 October 2001 two Islamic fundamentalist parties, the 
Jama'at-i-lslami and the Islami Oikya Jote (Islamic Unity Front), both with links to 
terrorist organizations, joined a four-party alliance led by Prime Minister Begum 
Khaleda Zia's minority Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The Islami Oikya Jote 
membership replicated that of HUJI and publicly declared its sympathy for Islamists, the 
Taliban, and Al Qaeda. It created dismay among the secularists because the coalition 
had become determinedly Wahhabi, having campaigned against theater, films, music, 
dancing, the consumption of alcohol, and "Hindu" artistic representation. Jihadist 
leaders "spoke of breathing the Islamic spirit of jihad" into the armed forces, and 
members carried posters of Bin Laden "with the HUJI slogan: Amra Sobai Hobo Taliban, 
Bangla Hobe Afghanistan ('We will all be Taliban and Bangladesh will be 
Afqhanistan')." [4561 



In July 2003 both the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the US 
Department of State warned their citizens and officials posted in Bangladesh to be 
aware of their circumstance in an increasingly dangerous environment. Al Qaeda had a 
special relationship with indigenous Islamists, and the government, despite repeated 
reminders from the international community, had done little to confront the visible 
presence of Al Qaeda mujahideen operating in and from Bangladesh Reports of 
mysterious ships with weapons arriving in Chittagong with scores of bearded 
passengers elicited little interest, and even after the SS Mekka, a rusting tub, made 
repeated trips from Karachi to Chittagong in 2001 , the government seemed to take no 
notice. The following year the CIA opened an "office" in Dhaka. When an Indonesian 
Islamist, Omar al-Faruq, provided specific information, Bangladeshi officials arrested 
four Yemenis, an Algerian, a Libyan, and a Sudanese who were involved in military 
training at a Dacca madrasa operated by the Al Haramain Foundation. After questioning 
"seven Al Haramain members," security officials searched the five-story Al Haramain 
office building in Dhaka and thirty-seven branches in Bangladesh. The charity "promptly 
ceased operations." Many Al Haramain employees who had entered Bangladesh in 
1999 were known Al Qaeda members carrying false passports. Arrested and tried, they 
were mysteriously released and disappeared. [4571 Under constant pressure from the 
US, Saudi Arabia finally closed the Al Haramain Foundation in June 2004, but the 
Foundation's office in Bangladesh continued its operations as usual, and its director 
remarked: "It is doing fine, no problem at all," its fourteen foreigner employees were still 
at work, and "the bank accounts of the charity and flow of funds are undisturbed. "[458] 
Finally, in August the UN included three Bangladesh NGOs on its list of terrorist 
organizations having links with Al Qaeda: Al Haramain, BIF, and GRF. 

By 2004 persistent raids on regional terrorist organizations, Al Qaeda, and other 
Afghan-trained mujahideen had eliminated many important leaders and scattered the 
Islamist, jihadist forces in East and Southeast Asia [459] These victories in the war on 
terrorism resulted in large part from the information shared by the Asia-Pacific 
Economic Cooperation Counterterrorism Task Force, the Southeast Asia Regional 
Center for Counterterrorism, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, and the 
South Pacific Chiefs of Police Organization of the Southeast Asian Nations Regional 
Forum. [4601 With the support of the UN and the USA, the nations of Southeast Asia 
have combined to make money-laundering, illegal entry, and the illicit use of charities in 
support of terrorism much more difficult to sustain 



Chapter 9 The Holy Land 



It's a cheap shot to say our money goes to fund terrorists. 

spokesman, Saudi Arabian embassy, Washington DC, June 2003 



On 29 November 1947 a resolution by the recently established UN General Assembly 
divided the then British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, thus opening 
another stage in the long and tortuous struggle by the Zionists, on the one hand, to 
establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the Arab Palestinians, on the other, to 
preserve their land holdings of many centuries. The Palestinians rejected the partition 
primarily because the United Nations proposal allotted 55 percent of Palestine to the 
new Jewish state, when Jewish ownership of the land at the time did not exceed 7 
percent. When the British Mandate in Palestine came to an end on 15 May 1948, war 
erupted, with the Palestinians and their Arab allies fighting against the Jews, who had 
the support of the international Jewish community and the sympathy of the West for a 
Jewish homeland in Palestine. Despite the intervention by Arab armies on behalf of the 
Palestinians, the superior leadership, organization, and military training of the Jewish 
immigrant population prevailed, so that by the time UN mediation arranged an armistice, 
the Zionists had seized 77 percent of Palestine, from which some 725,000 Arabs had 
fled. Thousands scattered throughout the world, but the vast majority of them soon 
congregated in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, and Gaza, 
organized and supported by the UN. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arab refugees were 
largely ignored by the impoverished Arab states, which had few resources to assist the 
poverty-stricken Palestinians in their refugee camps. Even the most fundamental type of 
charity, zakat, was infrequently committed to help the Palestinian refugees, for "the 
Quran is silent on the enforcement of the zakat obligation and the disbursement of zakat 
funds. " [4611 During the subsequent decades the Palestinians' hopes of regaining their 
lost lands, expropriated by the Israelis, or of establishing a new Palestinian state 
withered but never died. Despondency in defeat combined with poverty - material, 
cultural, spiritual - to move the spirit of charitable giving, so deeply embedded in Islamic 
society to serve the destitute, homeless, unemployed, the sick and infirm, toward a more 
political purpose in Palestine. During the next twenty years the Palestinian refugees 
became the wards of the UN Relief for Palestine Refugees program initiated in 
November 1948, and its successor, UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine 
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). authorized by UN General Assembly Resolution 
302(IV) of 8 December 1949. Other UN agencies, WHO and UNESCO, established 
sustaining programs, and both the Christian Red Cross and the Islamic Red Crescent 
Societies (International Commission for the Red Cross/Red Crescent, ICRC) then 
became involved and formed a peculiar relationship with the indigenous Palestine Red 
Crescent Society (PRCS). Since only independent states are recognized by ICRC, 
PRCS could not achieve full official status. Nonetheless, ICRC quietly provided support 
for PRCS training programs, radio transmissions, and the use of the Red Crescent 
logo. [4621 Other large international charities and NGOs soon joined their efforts. CARE, 
a US charity established at the end of the Second World War, was active in Gaza as 



early as 1948. It was followed by a plethora of smaller charitable organizations, both 
Muslim and Christian, that collected funds throughout the Muslim world for Palestinian 
refugees, and even in the West. 

During the 1950s and 1960s the charities had remained remarkably apolitical, 
concentrating on alleviating poverty and depression in the refugee camps. This changed 
dramatically after June 1967 and the end of the Six Day War. The secular Arab 
socialism of President Gamal Abdel Nasser was a spent force, and the indigenous 
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began to splinter into factions whose rivalries 
would last for decades. Some received support from Syria, others from Iraq, but Al 
Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement; Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini) 
led by Yasir Arafat managed to stay independent. Eventually the dynamic Arafat 
became Chairman of the Executive Committee of PLO in 1969 and its 
Commander-in-Chief the next year. After he had gained control of A Fatah Saudi 
Arabia began to provide generous funding, not only to symbolize its concern for the 
200,000 Palestinian refugees in Saudi Arabia, but because Crown Prince Fahd 
considered Arafat, a former Muslim Brother, much more acceptable than the other 
secular revolutionaries, whom he deeply distrusted. 14631 



Palestine Red Crescent Society 

As Arafat consolidated his authority PRCS became the most visible charity in the West 
Bank and Gaza. Several autonomous Red Crescent Societies had been established in 
the Holy Land after 1948, including offices in Nablus (1950) and Jerusalem (1951), and 
in the West Bank several branches served as satellites of the Jordan Red Crescent 
Society. Generally, they acted independently of one another, but each individual society 
still had the mandate to provide emergency medical services and other assistance to its 
Muslim population. In December 1968, thanks to pleas from Arafat and the intervention 
of Saudi Arabia, PRCS was granted full membership in the Red Crescent Society, but 
not the recognition of the International Federation in Geneva. The Palestine National 
Council then invested it with overall responsibility for medical and social welfare services 
in the West Bank and Gaza; it was also to work with the Red Crescent Societies of 
Lebanon and Syria and assist in providing humanitarian health and social services to 
the Palestinian population in the Diaspora. 

In 1993 the role of PRCS was dramatically changed after the signing of the Oslo 
Accords. At Oslo, Israel and the PLO agreed to the Declaration of Principles that led to 
the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA); during the negotiations Yasir Arafat 
had refused to sign any agreement unless his PLO was recognized as the sole 
representative of the Palestinian people. The West agreed; the Israelis did not. Israel 
refused to recognize Arafat as President of the state of Palestine, accepting him only as 
the head of the Executive Committee of PLO. The Palestinian Authority without Arafat 
was the result. The PA was to control all aspects of charitable giving, and PRCS was 
now called upon to play a leading role in the creation of a new Palestine Ministry of 
Health and to lay the foundation for the "National Health Plan for the State of Palestine." 
In 1996 PRCS for the first time met in general assembly to unite all their uncoordinated 
activities in the Palestinian Territories and the autonomous areas, and although still not 
officially recognized by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Crescent 
Societies, it was granted observer status, and the Federation substantially increased its 



assistance to Palestine. In 1996 PRCS headquarters was moved from Jericho to Al 
Bireh, ten miles north of Jerusalem, from where it supervised the activities of more than 
twenty branches and thirty primary health-care centers in the West Bank, East 
Jerusalem, and Gaza. It also continued to maintain three branches in the Diaspora in 
Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. 

By 1999 PRCS counted 15,000 volunteers, 3,500 staff, and a vast network of more 
than 70 hospitals and 300 clinics. Active in the fields of health care, blood banks, social 
welfare, and disaster preparedness, its presence was most visible through its fleet of 
ambulances that served the West Bank and Gaza. PRCS has also benefited from an 
alliance with the Norwegian Red Cross for institutional/capacity development, the 
German Red Cross/European Union for community health development, the Australian 
Red Cross for women's and children's health, and the British Red Cross for special 
education 



Charities in Palestine 

In addition to its support for PRCS the PLO also made certain it controlled the umbrella 
Palestine Welfare Association (PWA). Established in 1982 shortly after Arafat and the 
PLO leadership had been driven from Beirut by the Israel Defense Force (IDF), its 
founders were three wealthy Arabs: two lived in Europe, the third was chairman of the 
Arab Bank Ltd., often called the "PLO Bank." In addition, PWA received the support of 
Hasib Sabbagh, considered the "Richest Palestinian on Earth." Registered in Geneva in 
October 1983 with $30 million, the charity has never sought to disguise its close ties to 
PLO. Its primary task was to collect funds from wealthy clients and use them to provide 
humanitarian and health-care assistance. Critics of PWA have often asserted that the 
funds it spent for humanitarian assistance actually "free up PLO funds for the support of 
covert and military operations against Israel and the West." To be sure, many wealthy 
Palestinians annually sent their zakat to PWA, which spent it as quickly as possible, but 
the claim that it supported the covert activities of PLO has never been proven. 

Perhaps the most ubiquitous indigenous charity in Palestine was the charitable 
network created by the Muslim Brotherhood that first appeared in Gaza in 1946. The 
Ikhwan created a "network of social, charitable and educational institutions linked to the 
local mosques, which came to be known as Al Mujamma' al-lslami, or the Islamic 
Congress. " [4641 It built free clinics, centers for the propagation of its doctrines, 
mosques, and Quranic schools. Since 1967, however, one finds few similarities in 
Palestine to the activities of public and private charitable institutions found elsewhere in 
the Islamic world. With Israel in control of the former Arab Palestine, the funds collected 
worldwide through zakat, saqada, or from waqf foundations have been used first for 
political purposes and only second to provide direct assistance to the Palestinians. Over 
time Israel prohibited the activities of thirty Islamic charities on the grounds that they 
supported terrorist organizations. They included, inter alia, the Zakat Committees of 
Zenin, Tulkarm, Ramallah and Khan Younis, the Islamic Charity Societies of Nablus, 
Hebron, and the Gaza Strip, IIRO, and local chapters of the Holy Land Fund for Relief 
and Development (Holy Land Foundation, HLF). 

Although the Saudi royal family had extended its moral approval, it had at first given 
grudging financial support for the Palestinians until 1970 when the kingdom opened its 



purse-strings. During the next three decades billions of Saudi riyals were tunneled into 
Palestine, where the notable Shaykh Ahmed Isma'il Yasin benefited the most from Saudi 
generosity. Nearly blind and a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair from a sports 
accident in his youth, he and his family had moved to Gaza after their village had been 
destroyed in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Despite his paralysis, he studied at Al 
Azhar where he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Returning to Gaza, he became a 
powerful Islamist and successful fundraiser, establishing in 1973 the Mujamma', a 
welfare charity specifically to collect zakat. Although he never attended a madrasa, 
which would have given him the authentic title of "shaykh," his proselytizing skills and 
determination to halt the spread of western influence in Palestine convinced his 
followers to confer upon him that honorary title. He preached Islamist values and worked 
quietly in Gaza mosques, the Islamic University of Gaza, and eventually, with financial 
assistance from the Muslim Brothers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, he built his own 
mosque in Gaza. Here, he along with Muhammad Taha founded HAMAS in 1987, 
originally calling it the Palestinian Wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. His chief rival, Yasir 
Arafat, argued speciously that Yasin was collaborating with the enemy after the 
Mujamma' received support from the Israeli government and was seen to be in 
competition with the PLO-dominated PRCS. The Salafist shaykh shrugged off the 
accusations and continued to provide humanitarian aid while building what would 
eventually become a dangerous infrastructure designed for terrorism. 

Shaykh Yasin was not the only one to benefit from Saudi largesse. After the 1967 
Arab-Israeli war a Popular Committee for Assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen 
(PCAPM) was established in Saudi Arabia; in turn, it created in 1975 the Al Quds 
(Jerusalem) Committee (aka the Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada), and 
the following year established the Al Quds Fund. The Al Quds Fund provided hundreds 
of millions of Saudi riyals for the Palestinians, and untold millions were devoted to 
maintaining the Fund's ivaqfto support "the struggle and Jihad of the Palestinian people 
and consolidating their heroic Intifada within their occupied homeland Palestine, and 
particularly the city of Al-Quds Al-Sharif." At the Ninth Meeting of the Board of Directors 
of the Al Quds Fund, held in Rabat on 15 October 1990, and at the Tenth Meeting, 
convened in Jidda on 14 May 1991, member states were called upon "to cover the 
approved budgets for the Al-Quds Fund and its waqf amounting to a hundred million US 
Dollars each." A government mass media campaign was launched to encourage the 
"organization of festivals, exhibitions and charity bazaars at local and Islamic 
levels. " [4651 In addition, Saudi money was used to support the charities of PLC In the 
late 1970s PLO expansion had resulted in the exponential growth of the pro-Palestinian 
movement in the Arab world. Under the PLO banner regional, town, and village 
charitable organizations flourished. Hundreds of mosques were built, and for the first 
time direct Saudi funding was substantial. It was a subtle penetration and "by the time 
the [Israeli) security establishment began to understand what was happening it was too 
late to halt the process. " [466] 

The next major move in support of the Palestinians was undertaken by King Fahd bin 
Abd al-Aziz in 1992 when he issued orders to repair all mosques in Jerusalem at the 
kingdom's expense. Then, at the Twenty-First Conference of the OIC Foreign Ministers 
held in Karachi in April 1993, he announced a donation of $10 million to the Al Quds 
Fund, and Crown Prince Abdullah proposed the creation of yet another charitable 
mechanism, the Al Aqsa Fund. The latter became the Al Aqsa Foundation, with a 
capitalization of $800 million, and financed projects to preserve the Arab and Islamic 



characteristics of Jerusalem It would also assist Palestinians "to free themselves from 
dependence on the Israeli economy." And following the international recognition of the 
Palestinian Authority in February 1994, Prince Salman initiated a nation-wide campaign 
to enhance support for the Palestinian cause. [467] 



HAMAS 

In the early 1990s Shaykh Ahmed Yasin used his mosque to preach ever more violent 
sermons, which precipitated his arrest by Israeli police in 1983 and subsequent 
imprisonment. Freed in a prisoner exchange in 1985 Yasin was the first to conceive of 
Palestine as a battlefield in which Israel would be destroyed, to be followed by the 
founding of an a Islamist state in Palestine by jihad. This holy struggle was dedicated to 
the destruction not only of Israel but of any political movement that might recognize 
Israel's "right to exist." True to his Salafist Islamist core he "spoke of an Islamic 
Palestinian state as a stage" in the development of a greater Islamic nation. Yasin 
proved to be an accomplished fundraiser, but that did not satisfy many of his followers 
They declared: "A non-violent charity organization is good for the Arabs, but we have to 
deal with the Jewish ruler and for that purpose we need to establish a military arm in the 
organization. " [4681 When Yasin appeared reluctant to embrace more violent means, the 
dissidents broke with their mentor and joined the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine 
(Harakat al-Jihad al-lslami fi Filistin, IJMP). IJMP was founded in Gaza in 1980 by Dr. 
Ahmad Fathi al-Shiqaqi and Shaykh Abd al-Aziz al-Awda, both of whom had been active 
in the Muslim Brotherhood at Zaqaziq University in Egypt in the 1970s. Inspired by the 
Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, IJMP conceived of revolutionary rather than 
evolutionary means to their end. It appeared more dynamic, more youthful, and less 
parochial in its approach to confronting Israel than Shaykh Yasin and his circle. Of all 
the Islamist movements it was the only one that sought to bridge the chasm between 
radical Sunnis and Shi'ites in the Muslim world. The Shi'i radical ideology of the 
Ayatollah Khomeini, not that of the Muslim Brotherhood, became the driving force of 
their movement. [469] 

At its birth, the members of IJMP probably did not number more than 300, with 
perhaps another 3,000 active supporters, "the believers," whose duty was to purify the 
Islamic world, but particularly Palestine, of western influence. Since Israel was 
considered the leading agent of the West, particularly the USA, it would be destroyed 
by its military wing, the Al Quds Brigades, which were responsible for carrying out 
jihad. IJMP argued that deeds were more important than indoctrination, and by raising 
the banner of jihad by acts of violence, they would inspire others in Palestinian society 
to create a mass movement that would overwhelm Israel. During the 1980s IJMP carried 
out a series of spectacular attacks against Israeli soldiers in Gaza that were widely 
popular among Palestinians who, in December 1987, erupted into a general uprising, or 
Intifada. [4701 It began to solicit funds from American Muslims through the Islamic 
Committee for Palestine (ICP), a US charity affiliated with the University of South 
Florida (USF) which was used as a front "for security reasons." In response to IJMP 
taking the lead in the struggle against Israel and the West, Shaykh Yasin and the 
Muslim Brotherhood faced a popular challenge to their policy of indoctrination before 
declaring the holy war, and the shaykh acted decisively. He quickly formed his own 
militant organization in 1988, the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine (Harakat 



al-Muqawama al-lslamiyya fi Filistin) whose acronym, HAMAS, was soon known 
throughout the Muslim world. 

When Jordan disengaged from the West Bank in November 1988, PLO sought to fill 
the vacuum caused by King Hussein's withdrawal by issuing a declaration of 
independence "to ensure that the land [the West Bank] would retain its Palestinian 
identity." The secular PLO consolidated its position in the West Bank, but Shaykh Yasin 
would never cease his challenge to PLO for primacy in Palestine. HAMAS survived, 
gathering strength from its three pillars: Sunni Islam, Islamic charity, and the destruction 
of Israel. The popularity of HAMAS owed much to the vacuum produced by the exile of 
PLO leaders to Tunisia during the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 1982. By 1990 its 
charities incorporated an extensive network involving education, distribution of food, 
youth camps, sports activities, elderly care, and scholarships. HAMAS mosques were 
used to disseminate propaganda, as recruiting centers for jihadists, and as armories to 
stockpile weapons. Operating from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, it 
was given political cover by its own Islamic National Salvation Party of which PA 
disapproved but which it could not fail to recognize. No one knew better than Yasir 
Arafat that the stronger HAMAS became, the weaker PA, and thus secular authority in 
the West Bank and Gaza, would become. Ironically, Arafat's conundrum did not seem 
to bother Saudi benefactors who continued to fund both Arafat and Yasin 
indiscriminately. 

In competition with PLO, Shaykh Yasin sought to frustrate his rival by dividing HAMAS 
into a political section, with an appearance of rectitude, and a military wing that survived 
as an underground terrorist organization. HAMAS political representatives inaugurated 
diplomatic relations with the revolutionary government in the Sudan and then in 1992 
opened an embassy in Tehran. The political leaders of HAMAS began to appear at 
international forums, engage in dialogue with fellow Islamists, and collect funds for its 
mosques. It operated its own charitable organizations and schools, and maintained an 
internal intelligence apparatus, Al Majd (Glory). Meanwhile, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam 
Brigades were its secretive military wing, set up to attack Israeli military forces, Israeli 
settlements, and arrange for large-scale suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. Together 
the two halves of a single whole would oppose any peace with Israel, and they 
cooperated with the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), consisting of 
the smaller revolutionary factions actively involved in the Intifada. 14711 

The Israelis struck back against the Intifada. They arrested, tried, and sentenced 
Shaykh Yasin in 1988 to life imprisonment, followed in 1990 by the arrest of selected 
members of the HAMAS hierarchy. The Israelis security forces then confiscated the 
documents of the Shari'a Court in Palestine, an act that was strongly condemned 
throughout the Muslim world and considered a violation of international law. The seizure 
of these records was thought to enable the Israelis to confiscate Islamic viaql properties 
in Jerusalem. [472] The HAMAS command structure was purposely scattered throughout 
the Middle East. In Amman Mohammad Nazzal, a computer expert and former 
Afghan-Arab, directed HAMAS operations and maintained contacts with both the 
Palestine Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda. In 1991 he helped form the Jaish-e-Muhammad 
(Muhammad's Army) in Jordan, a terrorist group whose failed attempt to overthrow the 
Hashemite throne forced it to relocate to Iraq. Other HAMAS leaders were active in 
Damascus. 



HAMAS abroad 



Shortly after it was founded, HAMAS emerged in the USA, where it invested some $25 
million in housing projects. The funds were said "to have stemmed from Saudi and other 
Gulf Arab sources as part of an effort to finance HAMAS insurgency operations in the 
West Bank and Gaza Strip." Soliman Biheiri, an Egyptian national, was the 
administrator for BMI, the bank that acted as the conduit for Saudi and Gulf funding to 
Al Qaeda and HAMAS. BMI was a New Jersey Islamic investment bank founded by 
Biheiri in which Yassin al-Qadi and Musa Abu Marzouk, a HAMAS leader who resided 
in America until deported in 1997, had considerable interests. Both Qadi and Marzouk 
were listed as designated terrorists after 9/1 1 [473] They obtained funds through the 
Palestinian Occupied Land Fund, established in Los Angeles with a false address and 
no known headquarters. In 1992, the fund changed its name to the Holy Land 
Foundation (HLF) and moved to Richardson, Texas, and greater visibility with Shukri 
Abu Bakar as president. HLF financially assisted a number of Palestinian organizations 
in the West Bank and Gaza, including the Muslim Youth Society. It also assisted the 
families of HAMAS terrorists who had been "martyred," killed, wounded, or imprisoned, 
and thereby actually encouraged terrorism In fact, Rahman Anati, head of the HLF 
Jerusalem office, was arrested and indicted on charges of aiding and abetting a 
terrorist organization. 

In 1995 Italian intelligence reported for the first time in Europe the importance of 
foreign funding for HAMAS operatives in Europe. The Al Taqwa network had financed 
radical movements in Algeria, Tunisia, and the Sudan, and it had been a major patron of 
PLO during the 1970s, after which it also began to provide funds for HAMAS. In 
November 1997 the headline in the Corriere della Serra reported the startling news that 
HAMAS had lost "Half its Finances - Treasure and Terrorism, 50 Billion lire." More than 
half HAMAS's annual budget had somehow disappeared. Although HAMAS was 
accustomed to receive annually "approximately $50 million collected from charitable 
societies, generous donors, and sympathizers of the Islamist cause worldwide," in 
spring 1997 its leadership discovered that more than $28 million was missing from an 
account the Muslim Brothers used to provide financial support. An investigation found 
that the money flow followed a triangular route Point A were the donors who deposited 
their funds in branches of Bank Al Taqwa, Point B. Al Taqwa then distributed the money 
to Point C, "various shell organization in Gaza," corporations in Ramallah, and other 
HAMAS agencies. The decline in funds had "dramatic political consequences for 
HAMAS" whose money was already considered "the real power in the Palestinian 
autonomous territories." An emissary was sent to the President of the HAMAS 
International Committee, who was then living in Turkey, followed by an audit in London, 
where most of HAMAS funds were banked at Al Taqwa, "the financial heart of the 
Islamist apparatus. " [4741 The investigation soon led to the Al Quds Press and INTERPAL 
(aka the Palestinian Relief and Development Fund), both located in London. INTERPAL 
administrators were reported to have been skimming funds, and the Al Quds Press, 
which had its main office in Beirut, was using two sets of books. At Al Taqwa Youssef 
Nada was quick to counter-attack. He denied any culpability in the malfeasance and 
rejected the assertion that Al Taqwa itself was an Ikhwan bank. Nada countered that the 
Brothers did not exceed 8 percent of the 1,500 shareholders, and nothing should be 



made of the presence of Ikhwan leader Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, Dean of the 
Faculty of Shar'ia and Islamic Studies at the University of Qatar, as an adviser to the 
bank on Islamic principles. The loss of funds created a storm that soon blew over, and 
the door that had been opened to allow a glimpse of HAMAS operations was quickly 
shut. 

Despite numerous charitable sources it was, in fact, the constant support of the 
Saudis, mostly through MWL, that had enabled HAMAS to expand rapidly. Nevertheless, 
at a press conference held at the Saudi embassy in June 2003 a spokesman denied 
that Saudi Arabia gave money to HAMAS. "Do we as a government give money to 
HAMAS? No. We give money to the Palestinian Authority or we give money to the 
Palestinians through international organizations that are doing relief work in the 
territories." When asked if the kingdom had either directly or indirectly financed 
HAMAS or Palestine Islamic Jihad, Prince Saud argued that his government had sent 
funds only to PLO, as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The 
Saudis did admit, however, that when their own "charitable organizations were first set 
up there were no regulatory measures," and "if money reached HAMAS and Jihad from 
Saudi individuals, money reached them too from the United States, Britain, and 
France." The Saudi government even had the audacity to make the fatuous claim that it 
had instituted controls, "and the possibility of money reaching any illegal organization is 
non-existent." [475] 

Iran also did its part to fund HAMAS, providing up to $30 million a year. Determined to 
scuttle the Oslo Accords, it increased support to IJMP and HAMAS, and "worked to 
develop a rejectionist front, comprising Hizballah and 10 Palestinian groups based in 
Damascus, to counter the Middle East [peace] process. " [4761 The Muslim Brotherhood 
in the Middle East also pitched in. It established the International Muslim Aid Committee 
to the Palestinian Nation, which included Ikhwan, HAMAS activists, and IJMP terrorists. 
While the Saudi royal family may have believed that this amalgamation portended the 
cataclysmic y//?adthat would destroy Israel, the jihadists visualized their attacks on Israel 
as just the beginning of the purification of Islam in the Middle East. [4771 



The United States responds 

After 9/11 the US Department of the Treasury was not only concerned with Saudi 
financing of HAMAS, it also investigated a number of international charities and 
individual donors for the Palestinians whose assets in the USA were soon frozen. They 
included the Comite de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens (CBSP) of France; 
Association de Secours Palestinien (ASP) of Switzerland; INTERPAL of the UK; the 
Palestinian Association of Austria, and the Sanabil Association for Relief and 
Development of Lebanon. INTERPAL was one of the largest charities in Great Britain, 
and strongly objected when the UK Charity Commission froze its accounts, accusing it 
of being "the principal charity utilized to hide the flow of money to HAMAS." Founded in 
1994, INTERPAL had raised some $6 million in 2001 alone. Its director, Ibrahim Hewitt, 
denied any wrongdoing, claiming that "since 1996 we have been in fairly regular contact 
with the [UK charity] commission. We've tightened up procedures. " [4781 Thereafter, 
three more charities based in the West were also closed, including the Palestine Relief 
and Development Fund (INTERPAL) of the UK, the Al Aqsa Foundation headquartered 
in Germany with branches in Belgium and Holland, and HLF in France. In the USA, HLF 



was the largest Islamic charity to provide direct support for HAMAS. Under investigation 
since 1993, its proscription in the USA following 9/11 was a sharp warning that HAMAS 
would be treated with "the same severity as A Qaeda's terrorist network. "[479] Also 
under investigation were two major Islamic charities: Muslim Aid and the Islamic Relief 
Agency (IRSA), as well as the Jerusalem Fund for Human Services of Ontario, Canada 
and Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) of Montreal (formerly the International Relief 
Association). The Jerusalem Fund provided assistance to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, 
and Lebanon. MAP in the UK was also investigated. In addition to charities the Treasury 
also investigated banks operating in Palestine, particularly the Al Aqsa Islamic Bank, 
described as the "financial branch of HAMAS." Al Aqsa had been established with $20 
million in capital by the Saudi Dallah Al Baraka Group led by Saleh Abdallah Kamel, who 
persistently denied having any association with terrorist organizations. The Treasury 
also froze the assets of Yassin Abdullah al-Qadi, for the money manager was a HAMAS 
financial adviser. 

In contrast to the USA in the months after 9/11, the EU found the issue of charitable 
giving to Palestinian causes a difficult problem to resolve. WAMY, IIRO, and the Al 
Haramain Foundation had all donated money to HAMAS. In May 2002 some 200 new 
names were added to the European list of terrorist organizations, but Hizbullah and 
HAMAS were conspicuously absent. The EU simply could not decide if it was possible 
to disassociate the humanitarian from the political activities of a charitable 
organization. [4801 Finally, in August 2002, Germany was the first to prohibit the Al Aqsa 
Foundation from sending money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and 
forbade its staff from collecting donations in mosques, Islamic centers, and at "public 
demonstrations. " [4811 The following year HAMAS offices in Australia, the Netherlands, 
and Denmark were closed. In Denmark the Chairman and Vice Chairman of Al Aqsa 
were detained in January and $164,000 was confiscated. In May the USA and UK 
followed suit, freezing the assets and blocking payments to the Al Aqsa Foundation, 
which "fed money to HAMAS, one of the groups which sponsor suicide bombings on 
civilian targets in Israel." US Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Juan Zarate told 
reporters, "It's a clear signal the US takes very seriously the rejectionist stance of 
HAMAS and other likeminded terrorist groups that are impeding, in our mind, the 
[Middle East] peace process . . . [funds donated] with Al Aqsa's knowledge and consent 
goes to fund suicide bombers and other armed activities by HAMAS. " [4821 

In 2003 Senator Charles Schumer of New York, a Jew and one of the most outspoken 
critics of WAMY, which had recently hosted HAMAS leader Khaled Mash'al in Riyadh in 
November 2002, charged that HAMAS was using the charity "to get financing from the 
Saudis." Schumer urged the US Attorney General and the Treasury Department to 
immediately freeze WAMY's assets in the USA and investigate its headquarters in 
Virginia. Schumer found it especially disturbing that a nephew of Osama bin Laden had 
founded the charity in Virginia and was especially incensed that WAMY would support 
HAMAS and its leadership, which included reported terrorists Khaled Mash'al and 
Shaykh Ahmed Yasin. [4831 As for HAMAS, in September 2003 the Department of State 
reported that it was still using its charities "to strengthen its own standing among 
Palestinians at the expense of the Palestinian Authority . . . HAMAS' recent suicide 
bombings demonstrate the organization's commitment to undermining real efforts to 
move toward a permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians." [4841 By 2004 the 
USA had used Executive Order 13224 to "designate" five HAMAS charities and six 
HAMAS leaders and freeze the assets of individuals and entities associated with 



terrorism, including Shaykh Yasin, Imad al-Alami, Usama Hamdan, Khaled Mash'al, 
Musa Abu Marzouk, and Abdel Aziz Rantissi. 



Arafat's charitable corruption 

Since the Second World War the Palestinians have received more money from 
charities than any other single group in the world. And during its years in exile, PLO 
survived thanks to substantial amounts of financial assistance from the Soviet Union, the 
Arab states, and the European community, and by imposing a 5 percent income tax on 
all Palestinian workers in Arab League countries. Between 1993 and 2000 the PA 
received some $1.5 billion from the EU, and from 2000 to 2003 it was given over $1 
billion from the Arab League, but the total support from the international community for 
the Palestinians between 1993 and 2004 has been estimated by the World Bank at $10 
billion, "the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere. " [4851 
Arafat personally enriched himself, and in 2000 he maintained accounts in the Cayman 
Islands, Switzerland, North Africa, and even in the Hashmonaim branch of the Bank 
Leumi in Tel Aviv. His personal slush fund was estimated to contain anywhere between 
$300 million (Forbes) and $4 billion (Rawya Shawa of the Palestinian Legislative 
Council). An investigative report published by the HAMAS weekly Al Risala in December 
1998 estimated that the Office of the Presidency account held $400 million, "which to 
date has not been subject to any kind of external review." [4861 

Arafat also created scores of monopolies directed by his cronies in the West Bank 
and Gaza Inexplicably, despite rampant PLO corruption, in November 1997 the US 
Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) chose Arafat's friend Hani al-Masri 
and his private company, Capital Investment Management Corporation, to supervise a 
loan to the PA of $60 million. [487] In August 2002 Israeli intelligence estimated Arafat's 
personal fortune in the billions of dollars. [4881 A year later, an IMF study of Palestinian 
public finance discovered that the presidential office used 8 percent ($74 million) of the 
PA budget, $40 million of which was spent on administration, the remainder to be 
personally distributed as Arafat pleased. Moreover, between 1997 and 2003 some $900 
million in PA funds had been diverted to overseas accounts, including a reported $10 
million to the President's wife, Suha Arafat, who lived with her free-spending mother, 
Raymonda Tawil, in Paris on a $100,000 monthly stipend from the PA. [4891 Since 2000 
a great number of documents captured by IDF in the West Bank and Gaza have 
confirmed PLO corruption, embezzlement, and the use of charitable funds for dubious 
purposes. Especially reprehensible were the "irregularities in the distribution of foreign 
humanitarian aid" whereby favored doctors and pharmacists in the Gaza Strip were 
known to steal expensive medicines and sell them in private health clinics, while officials 
in the Ministry of Welfare regularly sold aid packages donated by the Gulf states. Even 
the Director of the Jabaliyya Charity Association of the PA Ministry of Religion was 
accused by local residents of stealing Saudi aid during the month of Ramadan. 

In June 2002 at a meeting in Gaza attended by members of the Jordan Charity 
Coalition (Aathlaf al-Hir) and a coalition of Islamic associations from Yemen (including 
the Al Aqsa Charity Foundation and the Wali Mekbal al-Juabirah Association), the 
Jordanians were represented by "known HAMAS terrorists," including the leader of the 
Islamic Committee for Support of the Palestinian People (the Jordanian branch of the 
Charity Coalition). The Coalition served as the umbrella organization regulating the 



activities of indigenous Islamic charities; its management council consisted of some of 
the most important Islamists, including Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi from Qatar and 
chairman of its fundraising apparatus and Azzam Mustafa Yusuf, the Acting Director of 
the Coalition and former head of UK INTERPAL. It was the successor to the Islamic 
Movement in Israel; the Movement had been closely scrutinized by the government of 
Israel and two of its most important major charitable institutions, Islamic Aid and the 
Committee for Aid to Orphans and Prisoners, were shut down in 1995-1996. In 
addition, the Islamic Relief Committee of Nazareth was closed in March 1996 for 
providing direct assistance to families of HAMAS activists. These closures, which were 
meant to discourage fundraising for HAMAS, failed; by mid-1996 HAMAS had opened 
new channels to the West and to the Arab states where the donations far exceeded any 
that had been raised in the past. [4901 

In Europe there were three important donors: the Al Aqsa Fund located in Germany, 
Belgium, and the Netherlands; INTERPAL UK; and "the Committee for Assistance and 
Solidarity with Palestine" in France, which were legally prorogued by Israel in May 
1997. Israel made no distinction between the civic and the terrorist activities of HAMAS, 
despite the fact that HAMAS had consistently promoted its social welfare programs, 
especially those teaching the Quran to children, building hospitals, and providing 
services "to women whose husbands died sanctifying Allah's name, or are held by 
Israel." HAMAS charities, especially in Gaza, grew in stature and significance. There 
were three Coalition "fund drives" in the West Bank, and charitable associations from 
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Great Britain, and the Netherlands were 
"complicit with the Charity Coalition." Even the poor Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina 
contributed to a charity association in the West Bank identified with HAMAS. In 2000 
the Coalition launched its "101 Days" worldwide Islamic fundraising campaign headed 
by Shaykh al-Qaradawi for the benefit of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. 
Eventually its name would be changed to "the Charity Coalition" and serve as "the 
umbrella organization that encompasses Islamic organizations in the Arabic and 
Western worlds. "1491] It emerged as a powerful HAMAS organization not beholden in 
any way to the PA 



Reviving the Intifada 

Determined to sabotage the Oslo Accords of September 1993 and the establishment of 
the PA the next year, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades unleashed a number of suicide 
bombings against Jewish civilians in Israel proper in February and March 1996, but not 
against Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza, that persuaded the PA to crack down 
on HAMAS. The PA responded to this challenge to its authority by shutting down the 
HAMAS fundraising apparatus. Charities were closed, administrators arrested, and 
documents confiscated. Undeterred, HAMAS proceeded on its murderous way, proudly 
proclaiming that in replicating and improving on the charitable organizations created by 
the Muslim Brotherhood their network of institutions had become "the sources of the 
movement's strength," enhancing its ability "to recruit operatives, including suicide 
attackers." HAMAS raised "an undisclosed amount of charity [zakatf that was then 
made in cash awards to its agents, to "families of terrorists killed," and to the terrorism 
apparatus itself. [4921 The HAMAS bombings that followed certainly contributed to the 
election of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was prepared to take a hard line against the 



terrorists. Nevertheless, King Hussein successfully lobbied the Israeli government to 
release Shaykh Yasin from prison in return for the release of two Israeli intelligence 
agents who had been captured in a failed attempt in Amman to assassinate HAMAS 
leader Khaled Mash'al in October 1997. Undaunted, Yasin returned to Gaza and 
launched a new onslaught against Israeli targets both inside and outside Israel. The PA 
and Yasir Arafat responded by pressuring HAMAS to cease its support for the policy of 
suicide bombings that the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades had set in motion in Jerusalem 
in July and September 1997.14931 

The extent to which HAMAS used charities to support its political and military activities 
was further clarified by Israeli raids in retaliation for the second major Palestinian 
insurgency, the Al Aqsa Intifada, in September 2000. On 28 September Ariel Sharon, 
the leader of the hardline Likud Party, visited Al Haram al-Sharif (the Temple Mount) in 
Jerusalem and its Al Aqsa Mosque, the third most holy shrine in Islam. This provocative 
act, accompanied by 1,000 riot police, was followed the next day by a Palestinian 
demonstration during which Israeli police using live ammunition and rubber bullets killed 
6 and wounded 220 rock-throwing but unarmed Palestinians. The fundamental cause 
was, of course, the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that now 
seemed more permanent after the failure of the Camp David Israeli-Palestinian 
negotiations in July. Thirty-three years of pent-up Palestinian frustration, despair, and 
rage exploded. As in the first Intifada (1987-1991) the Palestinians began by using 
non-violence, but after 144 Palestinians had been killed in demonstrations the Al Aqsa 
Martyrs Brigade and Al Fatah commenced their suicide bombings, at first against the 
Israeli army and settlers in the West Bank, and then in January 2002 against Israeli 
civilians. Although Yasir Arafat did not initiate the Intifada, he most certainly gave his 
tacit approval to armed resistance and terrorism. In April 2002 an IDF raid discovered 
Arafat's signature on a memo approving thousands of dollars for Fatah's ragtag Tanzim 
militia operation, which had directed several suicide bombings. 14941 

The relentless Israeli raids continued to uncover ever more evidence for the use of 
charities by HAMAS and Islamic Jihad as they looked for money "sent by Hizbullah, the 
Lebanese guerrilla group. " [4951 Despite their political differences, PLO contributed to 
HAMAS, and Yasir Arafat himself donated $1,000 to the family of a HAMAS member 
taken prisoner, because HAMAS activists were considered to be the "sons of the 
PLO. " [4961 The suicide bombings against civilians were roundly condemned by the 
international community, but payment for the martyrs became inextricably intertwined 
with Islamic charities. The Arab summit in Cairo in October 2000 overwhelmingly 
adopted a recommendation by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to give its support to the Al 
Quds Intifada Fund to assist the families of Palestinian martyrs. 

After the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada the Saudis agreed to provide financial aid to 
families of Palestinian martyrs, and repeated their firm commitment to finance the Al 
Quds Fund and the Al Aqsa Foundation. In addition to the promised money it "reportedly 
pledged Palestinians up to $1 billion to finance the continuation of the Intifada," which 
Saudi officials commonly referred to as "The Jihad. "[497] A detailed report prepared by 
the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) revealed that Saudi Arabia was not 
only incredibly generous, but by its own admission much of its aid was directed to 
"Mujahideen fighters" and "families of martyrs" killed or wounded in operations against 
the Jewish state. [4981 King Fahd personally supported the families of 1,000 Palestinian 
"martyrs," and a directive was issued requiring the governors of all Saudi Arabian 
regions "to initiate campaigns for every citizen to donate to the Al-Quds Intifada 



Fund. " [4991 An Israeli military-intelligence analysis of captured documents found that 
Saudi support to Palestianian suicide bombers who died in the calendar year 2001 
amounted to $545,000 via a branch office of the Arab Bank to families of 102 terrorists. 
Despite the fact that some twenty-eight terrorists were known HAMAS, Fatah, and 
Palestinian Islamic Jihad mujahideen, their families received $5,333 for each martyr 
and $4,000 for each injured Palestinian. Saudi Arabia pledged $400 million in 2001 for 
the support of "martyrs' families ... at $5,300 per 'martyr,' that works out to about 
75,000 martyrs." Of course, those 75,000 "martyrs" never materialized, but the loss to 
"martyr families" was perhaps made more bearable by the charitable contributions from 
the Committee for Support of the Al Quds Intifada, a Saudi agency run by Prince Naif 
bin Abd al-Aziz, Minister of the lnterior. [5001 

A nation-wide charitable fund drive was initiated by Prince Salman bin Abd al-Aziz, 
Governor of Riyadh, and citizens and guest workers were urged to give sadaqa and 
send funds, jewelry, and other valuable items to "Account 98." For years Prince 
Salman's Popular Committee for Assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen had organized a 
campaign urging citizens and expatriates to contribute to the Palestinian cause through 
donations either to its many branches or by depositing their gifts in Account 98, which 
had been opened in all domestic banks. Account 98 funds were then collected by the Al 
Quds Committee. The Supreme Council for the Funds of Al Aqsa and the Al Quds 
Intifada then utilized IDB to transfer funds to the Unified Treasury of the National 
Palestinian Authority. Funds disbursed through Account 98 were published in the 2001 
annual report authorized by Prince Naif, head of the Executive Committee of the Al 
Quds Intifada. Saudis were informed that the charity drive was led by the king himself 
"and his stand against the idea of establishing a Zionist state. " [5011 He personally 
donated $8 million, calling it support for the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli 
aggression against "our Palestinian brethren" fighting to establish a Palestinian state 
with Al Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital. Prince Naif also responded by encouraging 
donations from his Ministry, and he ordered the Saudi Ministry of Information to launch 
a propaganda campaign in support of the charity campaign. [502] Those who responded 
to the call of King Fahd, Prince Salman, and Prince Naif were, of course, the banks - 
NCB, Saudi American Bank, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corporation, 
Saudi-British Bank, Saudi French Bank, and the Al Riyadh Bank. The charitable 
institutions included the heads of WAMY, Al Haramain Foundation, IIRO, the all-female 
Nahda Society, and the Al Wafa Women's Charity Association. [5031 

The suicide bombers soon implicated PRCS in assisting terrorists. When the first 
female Palestinian suicide bomber apparently used her status as a field worker for 
PRCS to gain entry into Jerusalem and carry out an attack that killed one and wounded 
nearly two hundred, the legitimate charitable community was shocked. Israeli 
investigators charged that she probably used "a Palestine Red Crescent Society 
ambulance to get past IDF checkpoints into Jerusalem." Worse, on the same day in 
February 2002 IDF reported it had captured a Palestinian terrorist disguised in a 
doctor's uniform and riding in a PRCS ambulance as it tried to pass through a 
roadblock near Nablus.[504] Next, PRCS vehicles were seen transporting terrorists in 
Gaza, Ramallah, and Jenin where they were taken to sites from which they could snipe 
at IDF forces; IDF also claimed that Palestinian terrorists had used a PRCS building 
near Ramallah to fire on Israeli troops. The ICRC vehemently denied all these 
allegations, and the local PRCS publicly denounced IDF for their past attacks on 
sixty-eight Red Crescent ambulances, "leading to one death and 122 injuries." When 



Israeli investigators concluded that these assertions were false, the Red Cross/Red 
Crescent officials in Geneva admitted that there had been a problem with the misuse of 
Red Crescent emblems; Israeli objections appeared to many in Geneva as petulant 
retaliation against PRCS because Israel's medical society, Magen David Adorn (Red 
Star of David), had been denied membership by secret ballot among Geneva 
Convention signatories in 1949 and had its membership rejected by the ICRC ever 
since. 

The second Intifada, like the first, was a violent reaction against decades of 
harassment and humiliation, often accompanied by the ill-concealed contempt of the 
Israeli authorities for the Palestinians, but it differed from the first by more coordinated 
organization, greater commitment, and advanced skills in explosives. As the Intifada 
intensified, killing 125 Israelis and wounding hundreds more, the IDF launched 
Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002 to destroy the Intifada infrastructure. The 
IDF stormed four Palestinian banks in Ramallah, and two branches of the Arab Bank 
were thoroughly searched for evidence that would link suicide bombers to the sources 
of funds from abroad for HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and the Lebanese guerrilla group 
Hizbullah and enable the Israeli authorities to confiscate those funds from the accounts 
of militant factions that had claimed to have carried out suicide bombings. The offices of 
an Islamic charity in the West Bank city of Tulkarm were also raided, and computer 
hard-drives and documents were seized. These documents clearly revealed evidence, 
from correspondence between the PA and the Saudi government, that the latter had 
been paying compensatory money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. The 
correspondence also included "a damning letter from the Saudis complaining that the 
Palestinians had exposed [their] secret financial ties by allowing the publication of a 
Feb. 19 report in the PA publication Al Hayat Al Jedida thanking Saudi Arabia for 
assisting the families of terrorists killed in attacks on Israelis. " [5051 A letter written in 
2000 to a PA representative claimed that the Saudi committee that transferred 
contributions to beneficiaries had sent "large sums to radical committees and 
associations including the Islamic Association which belongs to HAMAS. " [5061 

In January 2002 $45 million was transferred from the Al Aqsa Foundation and the Al 
Quds Fund to the Palestinian International Cooperation Minister in a meeting held with 
the Saudi royal family to "confirm the strategic relationship between Palestine and the 
Kingdom." It was the phrase "strategic relationship" that angered the USA and elicited 
an acknowledgment from the Saudi embassy in Washington that the Saudis had indeed 
helped fund HAMAS. The embassy argued that the funds were relayed to the HAMAS 
political wing, "for charities they managed in the occupied territories." "Whether these 
are families that have lost a loved one to violence, we do not know." [507] Another 
spokesman for the embassy stated that the government of Saudi Arabia did "not fund 
terrorists," and refused to accept the State Department's classification of HAMAS as a 
terrorist organization. He refrained from any criticism of the suicide bombings of Israeli 
civilians. He stressed, rather disingenuously, that Saudi charitable support for the 
Palestinians used such international organizations as the UNHCR, the International Red 
Crescent, and the PA. 



More charitable support for Palestine and HAMAS 



Other Saudi charities had close ties with terrorists. The Al Wafa Humanitarian 



Foundation (Wafa al-lgatha al-lslamiyya), a powerful charity with offices in Saudi 
Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Peshawar, operated the Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Health 
Center and nursing homes in Gaza. It had close ties to radical Islamists in the West 
Bank and Gaza, and to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families. It was thought by 
some to be an integral feature of the Bin Laden network, assisting the movement of Al 
Qaeda and Taliban jihadists.[508] The Al Wafa Humanitarian Foundation did "a small 
amount of legitimate humanitarian work and raised a lot of money for equipment and 
weapons, but it was reported that Abdul Aziz, a senior Al Qaeda operative and Saudi 
citizen, used al-Wafa to finance terrorist activities. " [509] In the USA the Al Wafa 
Humanitarian Foundation was first on the list of Saudi-sponsored charities designated 
by President Bush as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity," and the first to 
have its assets frozen. Moreover, it was a partner in the Islamic Supreme Council of 
America Its Chairman, Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, had previously been 
involved in Islamist activities in Somalia. In Pakistan the Al Wafa office had been 
designated as "terrorist supporters," and the Council of Foreign Relations reported 
ominously that while Al Wafa had carried out legitimate work, it had also financed "more 
suspect groups. "[510] Washington expressed its concern about Al Wafa, whether from 
centers in UAE, Oman, or Mogadishu, when a senior Al Wafa official captured during 
the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was found to have close ties to the Pakistani 
nuclear scientific establishment. 

In April 2002 Prince Naif organized a two-day telethon to increase the funding for the 
Palestinian Intifada. More than $67 million had already been collected, but Prince Naif 
and Prince Sultan, Second Deputy Prime Minister, were determined to collect even 
more. Their slogan was "Hundreds of Millions of Riyals for the Palestinian People and 
their Leadership." Prince Sultan also staged his own three-day telethon organized by 
the Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada to reach 200,000 
Palestinian families "living in cities besieged by the Israeli occupation forces." The 
money raised by the telethon totaled $160 million, of which $18 million was given by 
King Fahd and his circle. [51 11 In the Gulf UAE launched a weeklong "For You, 
Palestine" campaign to raise more millions on top of the $86 million already contributed. 
Chairman of the UAE Red Crescent Society and Minister of Foreign Affairs Shaykh 
Hamdan ibn Zayed al-Nahyan asked people to give generously as UAE wanted to play 
"a leading role in the reconstruction of the Jenin refugee camp." Qatar alone raised 
some $10 million. Mustafa Hashim al-Shaykh Deeb, the Palestinian Ambassador in 
Riyadh, issued a frank statement: "Our people would not have continued the struggle 
without the support and backing of their Arab brethren," and the $1 billion "infused" in all 
Palestinians the "confidence and the spirit to keep up the struggle. The Kingdom's 
payment of $250 million it had pledged was a decisive factor in the continuation of the 
struggle." Deeb actually understated the role played by Saudi Arabia, for its payments 
already totaled $325 million or half "the $668 million pledged by the other Arab 
countries. " [51 21 

At the conclusion of the Arab summit in Beirut in October 2002 the Saudi royal family 
announced that it would augment its donation to the Al Aqsa Foundation and the Al Quds 
Intifada Fund by another $21 million. This contribution was one of many responses at 
the summit, whose resolutions promised additional support of $150 million. Ignoring 
criticism from the US media, King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah promised to provide 
"unlimited financial and political support for the Palestinian people and cause," and 
promptly deposited $7 million in the Al Aqsa Foundation account at IDB. I5131 The grand 



total donated by participating states to support the "Jerusalem Intifada" had reached 
nearly $700 million. Prince Naif, the General Supervisor of the Committee, had 
personally endorsed more than $62 million to benefit some 35,000 people. [5141 

When President George Bush raised the issue of Saudi funding to HAMAS during the 
summit of Arab leaders held in Sharm al-Shaykh, Egypt, in June 2003, the Saudi 
response was quietly diplomatic. In contrast, the Islamist reaction was swift and vitriolic. 
HAMAS leadership asserted that the movement was supported by private individuals who 
were "not obliged by the resolutions of heads-of-state summits." An IJMP spokesman 
condemned the summit arguing speciously: "No Arab regime provides any assistance to 
the [Palestinian] resistance. " [51 51 Ironically, his argument was contradicted by a Saudi 
Arabian embassy spokesman who informed the New York Times "that it was no secret 
that large Palestinian charitable funds existed in Saudi Arabia," but he said they were 
closely monitored and channeled through major international organizations. 

After 9/11 and the incremental deterioration of the US plan for peace in the Middle 
East, Israel moved sharply against the Palestinian authorities and their institutions. A 
series of raids found further evidence that incriminated the PA, HAMAS, and Hizbullah 
in the use of charitable organizations for military purposes. The Charity Coalition had 
conducted three "fund drives" in the West Bank and among Israeli Arabs, and had 
received substantial funds from charities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the 
UK, and the Netherlands. [5161 The Al Aqsa Foundation in Germany, despite being 
designated a terrorist organization by the USA in May 2003, continued to be a "vital 
source of funding" for HAMAS. Efforts by the Americans to convince Arab governments 
"to help rein in HAMAS" were largely ignored, for the popularity of HAMAS continued to 
grow among the Palestinians for the many excellent social services it provided, and it 
was not until the bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed twenty-one civilians that the USA 
redoubled its pursuit of the HAMAS money-trail. Several European countries now 
cooperated and under great pressure from Washington and UN, the Palestine Monetary 
Authority froze the bank accounts of nine Islamic charities, including HAMAS; the 
Islamic Young Women's Association; Al Salah Association (HAMAS); the Social Care 
Committee; the Palestinian Student Friends Association; the Islamic Charity for Zakat; 
A Mujamma' al-lslami (HAMAS); A Nour Charity Association; and Al Aqsa Charity 
Foundation. [5171 

Trapped, the PA promised to monitor funds received from outside sources and make 
certain that the money was used by institutions for "service purposes. "[518] Palestinian 
Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas publicly asked Saudi Arabia to divert donations that 
went directly to the Al Jamiya al-lslamiyya and Al Salah, and Crown Prince Abdullah 
"officially withdrew the kingdom's support for HAMAS in early 2002." Nevertheless, 
Account 98 continued to function "and fund groups like HAMAS." SAMA announced 
impressive money-laundering and terrorist financing regulations in May 2003, but they 
would not be enforced for many months. Meanwhile, the Saudi-based WAMY was still 
spending $2.7 million annually in support of the Intifada for which Shaykh Yasin publicly 
thanked the charity just before his assassination in March 2004. Shaykh Yasin was 
succeeded by his adjutant, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, but after his assassination his 
successor, Khaled Mash'al, was desperate for cash now that Saudi Arabia could no 
longer be relied upon for substantial funding. 

As summer 2004 approached Israel once again opened a frontal attack on both 
UNRWA and PRCS, blaming them for providing cover for terrorists. In the USA a 
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare report in 2002 



had already provided evidence that UNRWA facilities were used "as storage areas for 
Palestinian ammunition and counterfeit currency factories." Then, in June 2004, an 
Israeli television station showed photographs of Arab terrorists operating in southern 
Gaza using an ambulance "owned and operated" by UNRWA. Palestinian gunmen had 
used the vehicle, with a UN flag flying from its roof, "as getaway transportation after 
murdering six Israeli soldiers in Gaza City on May 11." Next, it was reported in the USA 
that an "ambulance-for-terrorism program" had functioned for years, and "humanitarian" 
officials, including a number of PRCS ambulance drivers, were "willing 
collaborators. " [51 91 In response, IDF closed the offices of HAMAS "Da'wa" charity 
organization in Bethlehem and Kalkiya, and in Bethlehem the Orphans' Assistance 
Association, which had received funds from the Gulf states, was also closed. [5201 

The demands on Islamic charities in Palestine, however, have remained greater than 
ever, for two out of five Palestinian families are utterly destitute and dependent on 
humanitarian assistance largely because of the rampant corruption within the PA and 
the Islamic charities operating in Palestinian territories. The EU, which had contributed 
€4 billion, remained convinced that the PA was the obstacle to political, social, and 
economic reform, and despite "the highest per capita transfer in the history of foreign 
aid" the average Palestinian lived on about $2 a day. European funding "had been 
distributed in a reckless manner, rarely reaching the intended target populations in 
full. " [5211 



Lebanon and Hizbullah 

One of the oldest of the modern Islamic charities is the Association of Islamic 
Charitable Projects, a non-profit international organization founded in 1930 in Beirut by 
the honorable Shaykh Ahmad al-Ajuz. In its early years the Association was more 
interested in helping the poor of Lebanon socially, educationally, and economically than 
in the propagation of Islam. When the Lebanese Red Crescent was founded, it was able 
to expand the health-care facilities of the Association. Until the late 1940s the population 
of Lebanon had been rather homogeneous, but after the founding of Israel and the 1948 
Arab-Israeli war large numbers of Palestinians fled into Lebanon where their refugee 
camps required an ever-greater humanitarian presence. Consequently, the government 
of Lebanon allowed PRCS to open a branch office in Beirut and solicit funds locally and 
through international aid organizations Yasir Arafat placed his brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat, 
in charge of the Lebanese branch of PRCS; this enabled him to control the 
organization's activities until he and his PLO followers were expelled from Lebanon in 
1982 during the Israeli invasion called Operation Peace for Galilee. Despite the 
vicissitudes of PLO, Dr. Arafat somehow managed to survive at the head of the Lebanon 
branch of PRCS until the start of the second Intifada, when he retired as an honorary 
member. 

At the time of the Israeli invasion in 1982 Palestinian refugees numbered about 10 
percent of Lebanon's population. PRCS was responsible for the administration of six 
major hospitals and thirteen clinics in Lebanon, and with UNRWA and a number of 
western charities it provided primary health care for 175,000 Palestinian refugees in 
twelve camps, the largest being Bourj Al Barajneh and Shatilla in Beirut, and another 
175,000 scattered throughout Lebanon. Severe restrictions on travel and work made 
emigration difficult, so the refugee camps and the charities supporting them soon 



became self-perpetuating. Poverty, unemployment, and depression were the tools that 
made Palestinian youths in the camps eager recruits for the jihadists from HAMAS, 
IJMP, and lesser radical groups that followed in the train of PRCS and frequently 
infiltrated its administration and staff. HAMAS presence was particularly strong in Sidon 
where one of its charities, the Sanabil Association for Relief and Development of Sidon, 
was placed on the US list of terrorist organizations in May 2003. 

In addition to the Red Crescent a new independent humanitarian organization was 
established in southern Lebanon managed by Hizbullah (Party of God), a militant Shi'a 
political movement with militias in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the suburbs 
of Beirut. Launched after the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, its 
indigenous spiritual guide was Shaykh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a radical cleric 
and author of Al Islam via Mantaq al-Qu\va (Islam and the Logic of Force). Iranian support 
for Palestine's Shi'ite refugees began with the creation of an Iran-Palestine Friendship 
Society shortly after the end of the Six Day War in 1967. It had existed for more than a 
decade before the Islamist revolution of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who provided the Shi'ite 
and Salafist theological foundations for the Hizbullah leadership The Ayatollah had 
argued for the establishment of an Islamic Republic in Lebanon that would assist in the 
destruction of "western imperialism" and work ceaselessly to effect the complete 
destruction of the state of Israel. To that end, HAMAS and Hizbullah "embassies" were 
established in Tehran to coordinate their activities despite the historical differences 
between Shi'ite and Sunni. Both agreed with Khomeini that "the goal of this virus [Israel] 
that was planted in the heart of the Islamic world, is not only to annihilate the Arab 
nation. The danger is to the whole Middle East, and the solution is in annihilating the 
virus. There is no other treatment." All means to this end were legitimate including "the 
use of charity money" to extirpate Israel. [5221 In conception and execution Hizbullah 
was an Iranian creation whose annual budget in excess of $200 million was subsidized 
byAI Wali al-Faqih, an Iranian government office, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard 
(Pasdaran) Liberation Organizations Bureau. 

The Emdad Committee for Islamic Charity (aka Imdad al-lmam) was the single most 
important charity sponsored by Hizbullah. Registered in Lebanon as an NGO, it was 
established in 1987 to "alleviate hardship" in that element of the southern Lebanese and 
Shi'ite population "most affected by Israeli occupation." It had nine branches, 
administered five schools and two centers for handicapped children, and provided direct 
benefits to 6,800 students and 3,320 orphans. By May 1998 the charity had registered 
50,000 families with 157,000 members. Other Hizbullah charitable organizations 
substantially funded by Iran were Al Shahid and the Al Mustazafin Fund, which delivered 
financial assistance "to the families of the Hizbullah martyrs, wounded, and 
handicapped. " [5231 Similarly, the Emdad charity could always count on generous 
donations from Iran and Syria during Ramadan and for the support of the aged and 
orphans, as can the Martyrs Foundation. [5241 Hizbullah managed its own charitable 
institutions without reference to the government of Lebanon, funding its own schools, 
health programs, and public works projects. The Jihad al-Bina'a (Holy Struggle for 
Development) served as its "reconstruction arm," building hospitals, schools, clinics, 
and agricultural development schemes. 

From 1993 to 2003 Iran had delivered more than $1 billion to Hizbullah for military 
hardware, but "a good portion - supplemented by donations from Muslims around the 
world, including the United States - was directed to Hizballah's social programs. " [5251 
While most charities "were founded with funding from Iran," by 2000 Hizbullah could 



claim that independent donations and contributions from the worldwide Islamic 
community now provided much of the cost of administration. Like HAMAS, Hizbullah has 
been listed as a terrorist organization by the USA and donations to its charities were 
prohibited. The US proscription had resulted primarily from the activities of Imad 
Mugniyah, an elusive terrorist and enigmatic figure who plotted bloody attacks against 
western targets well before Al Qaeda. He planned the first suicide bombings in the 
Middle East and was involved throughout the 1980s in a succession of kidnappings. He 
was also the Hizbullah "security chief who planned the 1983 suicide bombing of US 
peacekeepers in Lebanon that killed 241 Marines. Mugniyah was said to have been 
involved in the bombing of the US embassies in Beirut in 1983 and 1984, which left 
seventy-seven dead and hundreds injured. He was then charged with criminal acts in a 
US District Court in 1985 - three years before Al Qaeda was founded. Thereafter, he 
was charged with masterminding a succession of hijackings and the kidnapping of 
western officials. 

Mughniya managed to survive thanks to the patronage of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, 
but after planning the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina, which killed 115 
people, he vanished. His disappearance coincided with Hizbullah's emergence from the 
political wilderness. It was Muhammad Fadlallah, supported by Hasan al-Turabi and 
Iran, who convinced Hizbullah to enter the Lebanese parliamentary elections of 1992. 
This, of course, was contrary to the teachings of Sayyid Qutb and other Salafists who 
"urged Islamists to break with the jahaliya, or [pre-lslamist] regimes masquerading as 
Muslim Governments," and Hizbullah, not surprisingly, won seats in the Lebanese 
parliament. This gravitation to parliamentary democracy did not, however, alter its 
commitment to jihad against Israel. A conference of Islamic scholars held in Beirut in 
January 2002 concluded with a statement that Hizbullah, HAMAS, PIJ, "and all 
resistance forces vividly express the will of the nation" and that jihad and the 
mujahideen "represent the honor, pride and dignity of Muslims everywhere and reflect 
the human ambitions of all oppressed peoples in the world . . . [Jihad is the] noblest and 
most sacred phenomenon in our contemporary history." The OIC meeting held in Kuala 
Lumpur in April then rejected an effort "to include Palestinian suicide bombers in a 
condemnation of terrorism. " [5261 Strengthened by the rejectionists, Islamist activities 
increased in the mosques in east Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria where HAMAS, 
Islamic Jihad, and the Muslim Brotherhood were all competing for influence. Meanwhile, 
the US Treasury continued to scrutinize closely other questionable organizations, listing 
in May 2005 the Alehssan Society, a charity that operated in the West Bank, Gaza, and 
Lebanon and which supported the PIJ directly. 



Chapter 10 The Islamization of Europe 



If they are brothers, tell them it's for the prisoners. And if they are infidels, tell them 
the money will go to the poor. 

Sifaoui. Inside Al Qaeda 



Muhammad Jaber Fakihi arrived in Berlin in June 2000 to take up his post as Attache 
for Islamic Affairs in the Saudi Arabian embassy. A former law student at King Saud 
University in Riyadh, he had traveled in the West, but once in Berlin he displayed little 
interest in Germans or Germany. He much preferred the company of a few fellow Arabs 
who lived in a neighborhood of Middle Eastern immigrants. He ate his meals at a 
restaurant serving spare Arab fare and spent most of his time at the Al Nur Mosque in 
Berlin. A "slim man with a bushy beard," he assisted Muslims on the hajj, distributed 
Qurans, and disseminated Islamic religious literature published in German, but he spoke 
neither German nor English and played no significant role in the Berlin diplomatic 
community. Although introverted and withdrawn, Jaber Fakihi proved assiduous in 
organizing and collecting funds for charity. He had "arranged for Saudi 
government-backed charities to fund the expansion of Al-Nur" including $1.2 million 
from the Al Haramain Foundation. Fakihi had a grand vision that the mosque would be 
the center for the expansion of Islamic da\va eastward into Poland, Czechoslovakia, and 
Hungary. His model was the Islamic Cultural Center and the Central Mosque in London's 
Regent's Park, then under the direction of Ahmad al-Dubayan, Fakihi's mentor and 
predecessor in Berlin. In the late 1990s Dubayan had opened the Al Nur Mosque to 
preachers who, in defending Islam, justified violence. 

The world of Saudi diplomacy accommodated innocuous cultural attaches who 
managed to slip back and forth between postings to an embassy, on the one hand, and 
placement at a foreign-based Saudi charitable institution, on the other. Dubayan, 
however, was different. In Germany he had cultivated questionable friends, and after he 
left the Saudi embassy in Berlin for a London posting he seemed to develop a particular 
interest in jihad. In March 2003 Dubayan returned to Berlin to meet with Fakihi, arriving 
the day before that diplomat was expelled by the German government.[527] As Fakihi 
was a proven associate of known terrorists, German officials were prepared to declare 
him persona non grata. The Saudi embassy tried but failed to assure the German 
government that Fakihi's diplomatic activities had been thoroughly proper, but a month 
after his departure the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) placed 
"the Saudi embassy, its consulates and other facilities in Germany under surveillance." 
German officials were concerned that the Saudi Ministry of Religion was providing "tacit 
support" for radical muiahideen. \528] In one case, the King Fahd Academy, a Saudi 
school in Bonn with close ties to militant Islamists, was ordered to reform or close. 

Although the Fakihi episode elicited harsh criticism of the Saudis in the German 
media, it was not the first "diplomatic incident" involving a Muslim. In 1993 another Saudi 
"diplomat," Dr. al-Fatih Ali Hassanein, had set up TWRA in Bavaria from where he 
organized his pipeline to ship arms from friendly Muslim countries to the Balkans. 



Although thirty Bosnians and Turks had been quietly indicted in Munich on weapons and 
racketeering charges, the German authorities did not intervene in the activities of 
TWRA, nor did they interfere with the UN-sponsored Malaysian and Turkish troops who 
were using a Turkish charity to smuggle weapons from Croatia into Bosnia. The Turks 
were a sensitive issue in Germany. Two-thirds of the 4 million Muslims in Germany were 
Turkish and for forty years had been an important presence, despite the fact they could 
not become German citizens. Their strongest institutional representation was the 
International Humanitaire Hilfsorganization (International Humanitarian Relief 
Organization, IHH). IHH, an overseas arm of the Turkish Prosperity Party (RAFAH), first 
appeared in Zagreb in 1993. It smuggled mujahideen into Bosnia, and later Algeria. It 
also worked closely with Al Kifah, a bogus humanitarian organization founded in 
Germany by the Al Qaeda operative Kamar Eddin Kharban, an Algerian Afghan-Arab 
who worked out of Croatia. It competed with the more legitimate Diyanet Isleri Turk 
Islam Birligi, a Turkish government agency whose representatives regularly spent 
five-year tours in Germany, and with the Islamische Gemeinschaft Milli Gorus, a 
German NGO founded in 1978 as an association for migrant Turkish workers. [5291 The 
latter is now in the forefront of the battle against secularization in Germany and is a 
powerful funding agency 

In early 1996 General Asad Durrani, the Pakistani Ambassador to Germany and 
former chief of ISI, was forced to return home in order not to answer questions from 
BfV about the weapons traffic through Germany to the Islamist jihadists in Algeria. HCI 
in Europe was the principal financier for the Algerian GIA through which the Pakistani 
embassy facilitated the transfer of weapons. Strangely, the Algerian Islamist leadership 
"thought it unnecessary to waste one's time and energy building charities that could 
reach out to the grassroots." As one observer dryly remarked, they lived in "a fantasy of 
the Afghan jihad, where it seemed violence was enough. " [5301 



Muslim Europe 

There are 20 million Muslims in the EU, and their growth has been rapid and greater 
than the indigenous European population. In thirty years the Muslim population in the 
UK rose from 82,000 in 1970 to 2 million in 2000. France has another 5 million Muslims, 
mostly North Africans; there are a million Muslims each in Italy and the Netherlands, and 
a half-million in Spain. By 2000 nearly one in ten babies born in the EU countries was 
Muslim, and the percentage promised to grow through immigration and the significantly 
higher birth-rate. By 2020 Muslims will account for 10 percent of Europe's population, 
and most will likely be living in distinctly Muslim neighborhoods, ghettos, such as those 
through which Jaber Fakihi circulated. As they tend to congregate in ethnic exclaves, 
Moroccans with Moroccans, Algerians with Algerians, European investigators have 
found it extremely difficult to trace the collection and distribution of zakat and sadaqa : 
whether inside or outside the local community. What transpires in Europe's mosques 
remains somewhat of a mystery if for no other reason than that a new mosque has been 
opened somewhere in Europe every week since 1980. Germany has 8,000 mosques; 
France has about 10,000, most of them little more than prayer rooms. [5311 

The Islamization of Europe began after the Second World War, and grew into a 
massive migration by the end of the twentieth century. The migrants were mostly 
poverty-stricken North Africans and Turks seeking work, a higher standard of living, and 



security from civil strife at home. They settled within their own segregated communities 
where they could enjoy their own language, culture, and religion. They were mostly 
law-abiding visitors who quietly continued to abide by the religious practices of Islam. 
The beginning of the spread of an Islamist doctrine can perhaps be dated from the Third 
Islamic Summit Conference of Kaaba in 1981 and its "Mecca Declaration" by which 
da\va was to be used "to propagate the precepts of Islam and its cultural influence in 
Moslem societies and throughout the world." At first this Islamist ideal had little appeal, 
until the mujahideen's war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, after which the 
Islamists made determined efforts to spread their ideology into the heartland of Europe, 
first during the Balkan wars in the 1990s and then embedded within the massive tide of 
Muslim immigration that followed. [5321 

In addition to TWRA the Muwafaq Foundation of Sudan also acted as a cover for 
illegal activities in Germany. Registered in Karlsruhe in March 1995 but with 
headquarters in Munich since 1996, the Muwafaq Foundation was involved in illegal 
financial transfers and arms shipments to mujahideen in Bosnia. When interrogated by 
German police, its Lebanese director, Shafiq Abbadi, admitted his relationship with 
Yassin al-Qadi, from whom the Foundation had received substantial funding through one 
of his companies in Istanbul. On his release, Abbadi thought it wise to relocate to 
Britain, and settled in London. In the late years of the 1990s BfV steadily increased its 
investigations of Islamic charities to include Khaled bin Mafouz and the Human Appeals 
International (HAL Hayat al-Amal al-Khayriyya) charity, which had close ties with 
Muwafaq. Other investigations involved IHH and the Qatar Charitable Society, but it was 
not until after 9/1 1 that the German and other European governments began to work in 
concert to close down suspect charities. Within a month after 9/11 the fifteen-member 
EU had frozen the assets of twenty-seven Islamic organizations and individuals linked to 
terrorism. In all, more than $90 million of suspected terrorist assets were blocked in 
Britain, France, and Germany .[533] Europe immediately began to enforce old 
anti-terrorist laws and enact new ones. France restored a 1986 law that allowed special 
judges to investigate heinous crimes and the police to detain suspects for at least four 
days without evidence. In Britain, the Terrorism Act of 2000 greatly expanded a 1974 
law that prohibited radical groups. In Spain, terrorist suspects could be held for five 
days without charge, and in Germany laws were passed making terrorist activities a 
criminal offense. [5341 



Germany's problem 

The German government also proposed legislation that would have made it difficult for 
immigrants to enter Germany illegally, stay in Germany illegally, or claim political 
asylum. The minority Green Party in the Schroeder government refused to support it, 
however, and thus no penalties were imposed on the Al Nur Mosque in Berlin despite 
taped phone calls that implicated Fakihi in plans to bomb various German facilities. [5351 
The possibility that Germany was harboring dangerous jihadists seems only to have 
been taken seriously when an Algerian member of Al Qaeda was tracked in 1999 to 
Sydney, Australia, where he was detained and questioned. He was released because 
Australian officials found it "impossible to determine if the man was engaged in terrorist 
activities or establishing cells in Australia" nevertheless, they informed the German 
government that he was a member of IHH, an aid organization that "was a front for 



al-Qaeda." [5361 

For years the German authorities had been quite content to tolerate the activities of 
indigenous Muslim movements. They knew that the Haus des Islam in the small town of 
Lutzelbach near Frankfurt "had been set-up in the 1980s with cash smuggled into the 
country from the Middle East."[537] The Turkish RAFAH collected zakat throughout 
Germany without any official interference. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, the 
Germans could no longer remain passive when a Syrian businessman, Muhammad 
Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, was found to be connected to an Al Qaeda cell in Germany. 
Zouaydi also sent money to Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian-born financier and suspected 
"major player in Al Qaeda's European network," who operated an export-import 
business in Hamburg where he maintained contact with Mohamed Atta of World Trade 
Center notoriety. [538] Zouaydi was arrested in Spain in April 2002 after the transfer of 
some $600,000 to the Bin Laden network was discovered, and another $211,000 was 
sent to the Director of the Global Relief Foundation (Fondation Secours Mondial) charity 
in Belgium. GRF, founded in Chicago in December 1992 by five Muslims, had by 2000 
become one of the largest Muslim charities in the USA. It opened satellite offices in 
Pakistan and France, and in 1995 Nabil Sayadi, a Lebanese Belgian citizen, had 
opened its Brussels office to carry out relief work in Bosnia and the Balkans. Prior to 
settling in Belgium Sayadi had been for years an associate of Wadih al-Hage, the Bin 
Laden lieutenant convicted in the Tanzania and Kenya embassy bombings, and he had 
continued to meet with the terrorist during the 1990s. [539] 

During the summer of 2002 the German police finally launched a crackdown on 
Islamic charities in Germany. In July they raided the Al Aqsa Charity Foundation in 
Aachen, seized more than 150 crates of documents, and froze $300,000 in its account. 
The Al Aqsa offices in Aachen and Cologne had been under surveillance "for some 
time," but the police had refrained from staging a raid until a law had been passed 
forbidding religious organizations that supported extremists or terrorism. A few days 
later the Al Aqsa offices in Solingen and Braunschweig were also raided and more 
documents and computers were confiscated. The Al Aqsa lawyers insisted that the 
charities only "provided assistance, such as food medicine and clothing, to needy 
Palestinians." The German Minister of Interior, Otto Schily, replied coolly that 
"documents found in the group's headquarters support the government's belief that the 
charity was assisting HAMAS. "[540] Nevertheless, a year later in July 2003 the Leipzig 
federal court lifted the ban and allowed Al Aqsa to resume fundraising among the 
German Muslim community. Schily declared their decision "incomprehensible," and the 
Bavarian state Interior Minister was equally apoplectic, arguing that the verdict of the 
court "would render terror combat impossible. " [5411 

In December police raided three more Islamic organizations operating in 
Baden-Wurttemberg: the Islamic Workers' Union in Mannheim, the Islamic Community 
in Germany in Stuttgart, and the Islamic Union of Freiburg. The last was suspected of 
preparing forged passports and identity cards. The Islamist chase continued into the 
new year when German agents arrested Yemini Shaykh Mohammad Ali Hassan 
al-Moayad, the Imam of the Al Ihsan Mosque in Sanaa. Moayad was an important 
leader of the Yemen Islah Party and the Director of the Yemen office of the Al Aqsa 
International Foundation (AAIF). Ironically, he was arrested in Germany, not for his 
activity in conjunction with AAIF, but as the result of an indictment issued in the USA 
that charged him with providing arms, communications equipment, and jihad recruits for 
Al Qaeda. Moayad and his assistant fought extradition, but the German Federal 



Constitutional Court ruled he could be bound over. In November 2003 both were indicted 
in a Brooklyn court for conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda and HAMAS, 
and for supplying Osama bin Laden with $20 million that included funds solicited from 
members of the Al Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn. On 10 March 2005 a New York jury 
found him guilty of "providing support and resources to the foreign [Al Qaeda] terrorist 
organization. "[5421 German intelligence and security services dramatically increased 
their surveillance of "semi-state Saudi institutions," a euphemism for Islamic charities, 
and on "functionaries and private individuals" including the arrival and departures of 
Muslim diplomats. [5431 



Muslims in Italy 

Of all the European nations Italy offered the least hospitable environment for immigrant 
Muslims. The first mosque built in Italy was not opened (in Catania, Sicily) until 1980. 
Surprisingly, the Vatican, which one would expect to view Muslim migration with 
suspicion, was more sympathetic to the religious needs of Muslims than were local 
authorities in Italian cities and towns; it did not object to the construction of the 
impressive Monte Antenne Mosque financed by the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia that 
opened in Rome in 1995. Among the 60 million Italians the Muslim population of Italy 
was estimated between 800,000 and 1 million in 2000, 100,000 of whom were illegal 
residents. Islam, however, was not officially recognized by the Italian government, and 
mosques were under surveillance by the Italian authorities. They would instantly be 
closed, as in Cremona, if there were any questionable activities. [5441 Most Muslim 
families in Rome and Milan, the two major centers of Italy's Muslim population, remained 
poor, living in substandard housing, without subsidies or tax benefits. Except for the 
question of education most parents paid greater attention to events in the Muslim world 
than the internal affairs of Italy or Europe. There were no state contributions for Muslim 
schools, and Arabic was taught only through middle school, after which Muslim parents 
seeking higher education for their children had to send them to their country of origin or 
elsewhere in the Muslim world. Only 50.000 Muslims are currently registered to vote in 
Italy. 

After Rome, Milan has the highest percentage of Muslim migrants, one in five of whom 
arrived during the large influx of Muslims in the late 1980s. In order to preserve their 
own cultural and religious identity they organized their own associations and maintained 
charities. Some 5,000 Muslim students attended public schools in Milan and the 
surrounding region; their presence has precipitated vigorous and often hostile debate 
over Muslim-only classes and the wearing of the headscarf by female students. 
However, both before and after 9/1 1 the Milan Muslim community was sharply divided 
theologically and culturally. The Al Rahman Mosque, opened in 1988, is traditional and 
apolitical, and welcomes all Muslim immigrants and converts. In contrast, the Viale 
Jenner Mosque, which takes its name from the street it faces, is located in a rundown 
section of town and appeals to those Muslims who resist any assimilation. The Jenner 
Mosque appears to have had few resources, but in July 1996 the editor of Corriere della 
Sera, Guido Olimpio, exposed it as the financial heart of the Egyptian Islamist network. 
The logistical and banking ties of its radical leadership to Osama bin Laden were 
discovered, and after 9/11 its bank account was frozen. Nevertheless, it continued to 
provide a meeting place for Islamic revolutionaries in Europe. 



Although the Muslim community in Milan had its own newspaper, // messagero del 
Islam, it was culturally as well as theologically divided between two cultural associations. 
The moderate Italian Muslim Association had rejected the Islamist firebrands and 
considered the Wahhabis a "menace." In contrast, Milan's Islamic Cultural Institute 
trafficked in arms to support mujahideen in the Balkans, maintained close ties with 
jihadists in Yemen and Peshawar, and was called the Al Qaeda "station house" in 
Europe, moving weapons, men, and money around the world. The Institute had also 
provided support for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It 
also had ties to the Charitable Society for Social Welfare (CSSW), founded in the 
American Midwest in the mid-1990s, ostensibly to aid the victims of the civil war in 
Yemen. [5451 Funds solicited by CSSW went directly to the Yemen Society for Social 
Welfare, a charity founded in 1990 and considered to be the first voluntary organization 
of its kind in Yemen. CSSW also had ties to Yemeni Shaykh Abdullah Satar, a cleric 
who had visited mosques in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and who was an occasional visitor 
to the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan. 

After the bombing of the Khobar Tower in 1996 cooperation steadily increased 
between Italy and the USA. Two years later the Italian police arrested Al Qaeda activists, 
and in February 2002 a Tunisian suspected of "criminal association" and heading 
Osama bin Laden's European logistics operations received "the first guilty verdict in 
Europe related to al-Qaida since September 1 1 ." [5461 Six months later the USA and 
Italy designated twenty-five "New Financiers of Terror" who had ties to Al Qaeda, 
blocked their assets, and submitted their names to the UN 1267 Sanctions 
Committee. [5471 Included on the list were eleven individuals active in Italy and tied to the 
Algerian terrorist Salafist Brigade for Call and Combat, a faction of the Algerian GIA that 
operated in Italy, Spain, and North Africa and planned to bomb the US embassy in 
Rome. Another charity in which the Italian press showed particular interest was Al Awda 
(Palestine Right to Return Coalition), a charity with its headquarters in Carlsbad, 
California. Its members were present at the meeting of Islamist militants held in Assisi in 
September 2003 where the most radical members of the pro-Palestinian militants 
indicated "a growing alliance between Italy's leftist radicals and Islamists. " [5481 After the 
Italian government supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 five major Muslim 
organizations issued a position paper in April 2004 entitled "Against the War and 
Terrorism. " [5491 This irresolute document demanded an end to the invasion of Iraq, the 
return of Italian troops, and, almost as an afterthought, an end to terrorism. Thus, it only 
reinforced the concern that, although the Italian Islamic community was generally 
conservative and law-abiding, there was a thin stratum of Salafists, including members 
of the Union of Muslim Organizations of Italy (UCOII), seeking to radicalize the Italian 
Muslim community while serving as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. [5501 

One of the principal financiers of terrorism in Italy was Bank Al Taqwa. Although its 
operations have been examined (see chapter _3_), it was the center for the commercial 
network organized by Youssef Mustafa Nada and Ahmed Idris Nasreddin that 
constituted an extensive financial web in support of terrorist-related activities in Italy. 
Nada often traveled on an Italian passport, and was well known at the Islamic Center of 
Milan. Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, a mysterious Ethiopian businessman who reportedly at 
one time worked for the Bin Laden family construction company, served as the 
honorary consul of Kuwait in Milan. He had houses in Switzerland, Morocco, and Italy 
where he was a member of the board of directors of the Milan Islamic Center. He was 
also President of the Islamic Community of Ticino, a Swiss canton on the Italian border, 



and used a small Italian enclave, Campione d'ltalia on Lake Lugano, as a base for the 
Nada-Nasreddin business empire in northern Italy and Milan. His empire included the 
Gulf and African Chamber in Lugano, the Gulf Center SRL, the Nasco Business 
Residence Center, the Nasreddin Company (Nasco SAS), and the Nasreddin 
International Group, Ltd. In addition, the Nada-Nasreddin network also held interests "in 
one or more hotels in Milan." Both men used the Asat Trust to establish yet more shell 
companies in Liechtenstein, "where no record was kept of activities or transactions on 
behalf of the companies. " 15511 

On 7 November 2001 fourteen businesses owned or controlled by either Nada or 
Nasreddin were designated in the USA and listed by the UN "to disrupt their use of 
assets under their ownership or control that could be used to finance terrorist activities." 
The listings were the result of "the collaborative and cooperative efforts" of Italy, the 
USA, the Bahamas, and Luxembourg. The Nada-Nasreddin network had been financing 
a plethora of radical groups including HAMAS, Algeria's GIA, Tunisia's Al Nahda, 
Osama bin Laden, and Al Qaeda In December 2001 a Zurich paper published an 
article "concerning a 50 page report by the private Geneva Organisation du Crime 
Organise that linked Al-Taqwa to private 'humanitarian' networks. " [5521 Also drawn into 
the Nada-Nasreddin net was a Syrian, Baha Eldin Ghrewati, the leader of Italy's Muslim 
Brotherhood and the brains behind its front organization, UCOII Ghrewati maintained 
two homeopathic health centers in Milan and another in Rome that was "used exclusively 
for closed door meetings by members of the Muslim Brotherhood." He had been a 
frequent visitor to the Sudan. In 2005 the Nada-Nasreddin empire was still under 
investigation in Italy, Switzerland, and the USA. 



Islam and France 

France, historically the most determinedly secular nation in Europe, was by 2000 
home to the largest Islamic community in Europe, estimated at between 5 and 8 million 
Muslims, or roughly 10 percent of its population. Given the disproportionate birth-rates 
of Muslims compared to non-Muslims in France and the burgeoning growth of legal and 
illegal immigration, Muslims are likely to be in the majority by the year 2040. From the 
1990s the number of militant ideologues, the "Islamist Intelligentsia" as one expert labels 
them, grew quickly, and their determination and persistence managed to submerge the 
more moderate Muslims in France. 15531 Praise for Osama bin Laden was heard in the 
mosques; anti-Semitism festered. Some nine often imams were foreign born. More than 
half could not speak French and, despite the efforts of the government to work with the 
Muslim Council of France to strengthen the Francophone Muslim community, little 
progress was made. The number of new mosques under construction continued at a 
rapid pace, and from the ornate Institute of the Arab World in Paris to the most humble 
mosque in the suburbs, nearly all received some Saudi financial support. 

For years the French had sought to establish a single acceptable authority to 
supervise Islamic activities, and in 1990 it launched the Conseil de Reflexion sur I'lslam 
de France (CORIF), an umbrella organization that gathered within its folds the numerous 
and often contentious Muslim associations. That endeavor soon failed, CORIF was 
disbanded, and the Great Mosque in Paris then became the center for all the diffuse 
Muslim groups. When chaos ensued, the Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, 
convened a meeting of Muslim leaders in December 2002 and gave them two days to 



form a representative body of French Muslims acceptable to the government. The 
Conseil Frangais du Culte Musulman (CFCM) was the result of their deliberations, 
chaired by Dalil Boubakeur, the aging Rector of the Great Mosque. A CFCM Council 
was elected in April 2003, and despite the fact the Council was more radical than 
Sarkozy had hoped, the government now had a single organization through which it 
could monitor the activities of French Muslims. Boubakeur, however, was not neutral. He 
owed his position and salary to the military government of Algiers and that, from the 
point of view of the Islamists, vitiated his claim to authority over the Muslim community in 
France. 

Indeed, Sarkozy was already fighting a losing battle to gain control of the powerful and 
independent Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (French Union of Islamic 
Organizations, UOIF). UOIF received substantial funding from Saudi "foundations," and 
was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe led by Tariq Ramadan, the 
Swiss-born grandson of the Egyptian founder, Hasan al-Banna. Sarkozy also could do 
little to influence the Islamic Countries Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization 
(ICESCO), which also received substantial financial assistance from Saudi Arabia and 
was very active in France. ICESCO proposed to finance a school in France to educate 
imams that would most certainly result in the spread of the Wahhabi indoctrination of 
Muslim society in France and the radicalization of a community that was once the 
province of the more moderate immigrant imams from Algeria. 

In Paris, along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in the Tenth Arrondissement Turks, 
Algerians, Pakistanis, Tunisians, and Moroccans, who live in low-rent apartments in this 
decaying enclave, converge on its mosque every Friday around 13:30 and pray for the 
victory of the Muslim renaissance. It is one of 1,685 mosques that the government 
officially recognizes and is probably included among the fifty radical mosques that the 
two domestic intelligence agencies, the Renseignements Generaux (RG) and the 
Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, a counter-intelligence agency, watch very 
closely. Muslim sources, on the other hand, claim that the number of mosques and 
prayer rooms is at least five times greater than the official figure, mostly located in 
empty buildings, shabby rooms, basements, and garages where many self-styled imams 
hold forth. After prayers donations are received on behalf of the "Islamic Salvation 
Front, Jama'at-lslami, Tanzeem-lslami, Sunni Tehrik, Jamiat Ulema, and the Kashmir 
Muslim Front."[554l Some donations are delivered directly to International Islamic Aid 
(IIA) in France. Charities such as HA are registered in accordance with a 1901 law 
dealing with charitable organizations, and their accounts can be scrutinized by 
government officials, but rarely are. There are more than six hundred Islamic 
associations of one sort or another active in France and most receive little attention, 
often for political reasons. One such is the very active Pakistan Muslim Welfare 
Association, a "global network" that receives the support of the Pakistani embassy and 
was designed to assist immigrant Pakistanis with problems of cultural integration. Less 
threatening are the regional associations such as the Association des Musulmans de la 
Gironde and des Alpes Mari in Nice, whose charitable collection and distribution of 
donations is unusually transparent. 

By 1991 the Faubourg Saint-Denis Mosque, which received subsidies from the 
Saudis, Iraq, UAE, and Kuwait, had attracted the attention of the French authorities. It 
had become the center for Salafists from Algeria at a time when the political situation in 
Algeria was deteriorating and Wahhabi ideology was growing among the more than 1 
million Algerians living in France. The prospect of the first free national elections in 



Algeria had precipitated riots in Algiers by the supporters of the Islamic Salvation Front 
(FIS) of Shaykh Abbasi Medani. FIS, which had been receiving Saudi financial support 
until Medani endorsed the1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, had substantial numbers of 
Afghan-Arabs and a network of mosques and Islamic charities that enabled it to win the 
first phase of the elections in December 1991. When it became apparent that the 
Islamists were about to triumph in the final vote, the military intervened and the elections 
scheduled for January 1992 were canceled. A military dictatorship followed. Over the 
next decade more than 100,000 Algerians perished in the subsequent civil war between 
the Algerian military and Salafist insurgents that included the infamous "Afghan Legion" 
trained in Al Qaeda camps. Although many Algerian revolutionaries escaped to France 
where they joined Al Qaeda cells and kept to themselves, their leaders were not 
welcome. Algerian rebel leader Abdelkader Benouis fled Algiers for Saudi Arabia, from 
where he was soon expelled for collecting funds for Al Qaeda. Benouis next appeared in 
France, but when he began soliciting funds for Islamist movements, he was arrested 
and expelled. He fled to Pakistan and then Belgium before taking refuge in the UK where 
from 1998 onward he was under constant surveillance. 

In a more recent case, Abdelkader Bouziane, an Algerian-born imam from Lyon, had 
lived in France for twenty-five years and achieved notoriety for advocating wife-beating 
and the stoning of women in cases of marital infidelity. When the French courts 
prevented his expulsion, Sarkozy's successor at the Interior Ministry, Dominique de 
Villepin, changed the law, and Bouziane was soon deported with the blessing of the 
Rector of the Great Mosque. M. de Villepin had no illusions about the Islamists. "We 
need a strong policy to combat radical Islam. It is used as a breeding-ground for 
terrorism. We cannot afford not to watch them very closely. " [5551 His anti-Islamist 
policy was two-pronged. The first was zero tolerance for the slightest incitement to 
violence by Islamists, which would be met by repressive force. The second sought to 
gain the initiative by promoting moderate and secular Muslims by a foundation to 
replace CFCM, which had fallen under the control of the radicals. 



Islamic charities, Algerian Islamists, and Palestinians 

The "Wahabbi invasion" of Islamic charitable institutions in France began when MWL 
opened its Paris office in 1979. At the time MWL was principally interested in providing 
financial assistance for the construction of mosques and madrasas and in the 1980s a 
number of other Saudi charities opened branch offices in France. A decade later a host 
of obscure Islamic charities sponsored projects "in war-torn countries," particularly 
Algeria and Palestine. By then the French Ministry of Interior had acknowledged that it 
had difficulties overseeing the outreach activities of Muslim charities. The Comite de 
Bienfaisance et Secours aux Palestiniens (CBSP), founded in 1990 in Nancy by 
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, soon established a powerful presence in France. 
CBSP was the first charity to use an internet site (www.islamiya.net ) to collect zakat and 
sadaqa, and it was soon followed by other Islamic charities, giving greater unity to 
Muslims in France by the click of a computer mouse. A second charity, Secours 
Islamique (Islamic Relief), founded in 1992, soon supported five offices in the West 
Bank and Gaza and was considered an especial favorite of the Saudis In contrast to 
the questionable activities of such charities as Muwafaq and Al Haramain Foundation, 
the Nimatullahi Sufi order worked diligently and openly in France Founded in Persia in 



the fourteenth century, its successful fund drives enabled the construction of two 
centers, one east of Paris, the other in a suburb of Lyon. Like Nimatullahi, the other Sufi 
orders in France were historically ill-disposed to Salafist ideology and Wahhabism; most 
of their followers came from the former French colonies in West Africa and had little 
interest in supporting revolutionary movements. Many of their preachers belonged to the 
Mouride tariqa, a dominant force within Senegalese Islam that emphasized the virtue of 
hard work and whose members paid little attention to the anti-Semitic or pro-Salafist 
propaganda that so moved Muslims from the Middle East. 

Paris became the favorite European city for numerous Pakistani Islamists, including 
Dr. Israr Ahmad, the Islamic revolutionary and amir of Tanzeem-e-lslami since its 
founding in 1975. Dr. Ahmad first visited Paris in September 1993 as the guest of an 
Islamic center operated by Algerian and Moroccan fundamentalists in the Tenth 
Arrondissement, a center that had been under surveillance by the French authorities for 
some time. In September 1995 he would address the annual convention of the Islamic 
Society of North America in Columbus, Ohio, to warn Muslims to "prepare themselves 
for the coming conflict" with the West. [5561 Next, Senator Qazi Hussain Ahmed, 
Secretary General of Pakistan's largest Islamic party, the Jama'at-i-lslami, visited Paris 
from Peshawar in June 1994 "to meet Algerian FIS members and other Maghribian 
fundamentalist activists." Qazi would eventually succeed in uniting Pakistan's major 
religious parties in the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal coalition, and became its Acting 
President. His enemies have tried to link him to the Al Rashid Trust and Al Akhtar Trust, 
two charities later designated by the USA as sponsors of terrorism. 

A month after Qazi's arrival in Paris French police arrested in Perpignan four terrorists 
from Tangiers. The leader, Hallal Ahmed al-Hamiani, an Algerian, was a member of Al 
Kifah, the notorious "humanitarian" organization and an offshoot of Al Qaeda. The team 
was preparing to attack American and Jewish targets in the Barcelona region. In March 
1995 Maulana Fazlur Rehman, President of the Pakistani parliamentary Foreign 
Relations Committee, visited Paris to meet with the President of the Pakistan Muslim 
Social Welfare Association in France. A veteran of the Afghan war, Maulana was a 
director of the Da'wa Jihad University in Kakarkhel near Mardan, which was supported 
by substantial funding from the Saudis and UAE. The USA would later accuse the 
institution of running terrorist training centers. 

All this Islamist activity had not gone unnoticed by the Parisian press In August 1993 
La Vie published an article, "Islamists Give Conditional Food," that questioned the 
legitimacy of Islamic Relief (Secours Islamic). Islamic Relief demanded a public apology 
and threatened to bring suit: La Vie was forced to print an apology and pay legal costs. 
When Le Point also published a defamatory article against Islamic Relief on 14 August 
1993, the courts ruled against the newspaper, and when Liberation published an article 
the following year, August 1994, it too lost a similar suit to Islamic Relief, as did two 
other newspapers. These setbacks momentarily discouraged investigative journalism by 
the Parisian press despite the suspicion that Islamic Relief was involved in weapons 
deals with Bosnia. [5571 After a series of bombings in and near French train stations 
from July to October 1995, the press renewed its inquiries into Algerian Islamists, to 
discover that as early as 1994 the French Interior Minister had complained to Riyadh 
about the transfer of Saudi funds for Algerian terrorists. [5581 In August 1995 the 
conservative Paris daily Le Figaro reported that French security services were aware 
that Algerian Islamists had already "set up a security network across Europe with 



fighters trained in Afghan guerrilla camps and [in] southern France, while some have 
been tested in Bosnia. " [5591 

Immediately after the outbreak of the bombings French police were able to attribute 
them to various Maghrebian Islamist organizations. More than a hundred Islamists, 
Islamic mosques, charities, and institutions were placed under close scrutiny, and in 
October and November 1995 additional numbers of Algerian suspects were arrested. 
The French intelligence service attributed the attacks to Osama bin Laden and to 
Afghan-Arab sleeper cells that were soon ferreted out by the French security services. 
In September 1997 the Paris office of CBSP was the subject of a "violent attack" that led 
the international Islamic Human Rights Commission of France to protest to the French 
authorities. [5601 The Commission's report argued that CBSP was "one of the four 
charities currently being targeted by the Israeli government." The organizations claimed 
that the attack was carried out by GSC, known in the Middle East as the Zionist Action 
Group and called a branch of the Jewish Defense League, a terrorist organization that 
had emerged in New York during the late 1960s. 

By 2002 Palestine had replaced Afghanistan as "the number one cause celebre of the 
year" for Islamic charities in France. However, after years of activity there still existed 
"no official records of the checks sent to local mosques and Islamic charities to rebuild 
shattered Palestinian communities, nor charitable donations received by other 
denominations." It was common practice for donations received at the PLO office in 
France to be forwarded "to charity bank accounts in the Palestinian territories" without 
recording them. The imam of the Paris Mosque, the de facto leader of the Islamic 
community in France, continued to urge the collection of zakat and participation in 
charitable works through sadaqa, but he limited "direct appeals to prayer" in order to 
avoid "anything inflammatory that would further divide the Muslim and Jewish 
communities in France. " [5611 President Jacques Chirac for years had maintained a 
very close relationship with Yasir Arafat, and then with Leila Shahid, PLO representative 
in Paris, and was thus loath to move against the Palestinian activists or HAMAS-related 
charities. Nonetheless, France had begun to freeze the assets of pro-Palestinian 
charities by August 2003, and Chirac warned Arafat that "time is of the essence and if 
nothing is done, France will soon be all alone as the only country supporting you. " [5621 

When Jacques Chirac visited the Great Mosque in 2002 to meet with the imams of 
Paris and other cities and with a delegation from the Muslim community, it was the first 
time that a President of France had visited the Great Mosque since its opening in 1926 
Chirac came "to address a message of confidence and gratitude to the Muslim 
community and its representatives who condemned the September 11th attacks and 
called for the use of calm, understanding, and dialogue during the current crisis." He 
stressed the importance of "establishing dialogue between the authorities and Muslim's 
representatives in France and noted that he has always been in favor of establishing an 
organization that represents all Muslims with transparency under the umbrella of 
respecting the laws and principles of the Republic. " [5631 Time, however, appeared to be 
on the side of the imams, for a study prepared by French domestic intelligence had 
found that at least half of the 630 Muslim-dominated suburbs had already drifted far 
from the mainstream. They had become, the report warned, "separate ethnic 
communities," ghettoes isolated from mainstream French society that "could encourage 
radical Islam to take root." Not surprisingly, these suburbs suffered from high 
unemployment and crime, while "a growing number of Islamic prayer rooms, as well as 
frequent anti-Western and anti-Semitic graffiti" were omnipresent. Moreover, the French 



language was rejected by many Muslims. Attendance at Friday prayers had increased, 
and zakat and sadaqa were openly donated, not for domestic purposes but for 
international causes. For decades, France had hoped that its immigrants and their 
children would simply integrate into secular French society. Instead, the opposite was 
happening, "with the divide becoming ever greater."[564] 



The Netherlands, Belgium, and the Danes 

The Netherlands and Belgium, two of the smallest nations of Europe, are considered 
the most tolerant of varied lifestyles and religious practices. For years they have served 
as safe havens for Islamists, many of whom would willingly betray their hospitality. The 
Netherlands was the preferred home for most, and by 2000 there were about 800,000 
Muslims and an unknown number of illegal residents living among 16 million Dutch. In 
the mid-1990s Al Qaeda, the Algerian GIA, and HAMAS were operating freely in 
Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Eindhoven. Ayman al-Zawahiri had spent much of 1998 
traveling on a Dutch passport, and he returned to visit under the name of Sami 
Mahmoud al-Hifnawi. The Muwafaq Foundation was active in Breda in southern Holland, 
and members of the board included its founder, Yassin al-Qadi of Saudi Arabia, and its 
Director, Chafiq Ayadi of Tunisia, both of whom were later named "designated 
nationals" on the US Treasury's list. By 1998 the Dutch intelligence agency 
(Binnelandse Veiligheidsdienst, BVD) had linked the Al Waqf Al Islami Foundation to 
"extremist" Islamist causes, using the Al Furqan Mosque in Eindoven to solicit sadaqa 
and spread the Wahhabi message. The history of the Al Furqan Mosque, one of the 
most infamous in Europe, was interwoven with that of the Al Waqf Al Islami Foundation 
and Ahmed Cheppih, a wealthy Moroccan immigrant who had received political asylum 
in the 1970s. Cheppih helped found the Al Furqan Mosque in 1989, and using the Al 
Waqf made it an important center for seminars on Islamic law and other Islamist topics 
that would attract "several thousand students a year during the 1980s and 1990s." 
Curiously, in Bulgaria, half a continent distant, Al Waqf Al Islami was, thanks to an 
infusion of Saudi funds, sponsoring the construction of mosques and schools wherein 
Wahhabi teaching would dominate. During 1993-1994 it paid for more than a dozen 
mosques before being expelled without explanation in 1994. Also without explanation, it 
was allowed to reemerge following 9/1 1 ; shortly thereafter a close tie to Eindhoven was 
discovered. A member of the Eindhoven Al Waqf Al Islami board of directors was 
Hamad al-Hussein, brother of Abdullah Osman Abdul Rahman al-Hussein, the 
Director-General of Al Waqf Al Islami itself. The latter had initiated operations in 
Bulgaria and was named among the participants in the Golden Chain. 

At the Al Furqan Mosque the seminars were almost always held in Dutch, "but the 
message was imported from Saudi Arabia, via Saudi books and lecturers who taught a 
strict, orthodox interpretation of Islam. " 15651 They "drilled extremist messages into the 
heads of thousands of young Muslims from across the Continent," and among its most 
famous graduates were a "half a dozen members of the group of young men from 
Hamburg, Germany, who plotted the Sept. 11 attacks" on the USA. [5661 

Cheppih's son, Muhammad Cheppih, had been educated in Saudi Arabia, and when 
he returned to the Netherlands in 2000, he did so as a representative of MWL. Shortly 
afterward, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD, formerly BVD) 
alleged that Cheppih's elementary schools spread "extremist beliefs." When questioned, 



the elder Cheppih expressed ignorance as to the extent of Al Waqf funding in 
Eindhoven or for the six primary schools it sponsored. He did admit, however, that MWL 
spent $50,000 a year to offer courses on Islamic law and beliefs in Rotterdam and 
Amsterdam. Muhammad Cheppih also represented for a time the Arab-European 
League (AEL), an immigrant Islamist institution founded in Belgium with Saudi funds by 
the rabble-rousing Dyab Abu Jahjah, a known Hizbullah terrorist. In Holland the secret 
service was convinced that AEL was a security risk, but it did not investigate its funding 
or halt the charity's activities. 

After 9/11 the Dutch began to crack down on Islamic charities. The Al Aqsa 
Foundation, which helped fund many Palestinian causes, was closed and its assets 
frozen while the government sought to find any links it had to terrorist groups. The Al 
Haramain Foundation was also under suspicion. Linked to the 1998 attacks on US 
embassies in Africa, it was represented in Amsterdam by the Al Tawhid Mosque and 
Foundation, another major Saudi charity. The Al Haramain Director, Uqayl bin Abdul 
Aziz al-Uqayl (Aqeel al-Aqeel), a strong supporter of the Islamic struggle in Chechnya, 
served on its board. I5671 While Al Haramain continued to operate in the Netherlands, 
the Dutch authorities discovered that Al Qaeda was using the Funds Beyond Frontiers 
Foundation internet website ( www.qoqaz.nl ) to collect charity in support of the jihad in 
Chechnya. It praised "brother Osama bin Laden," and urged Muslims "to learn firearms 
skills at shooting clubs and to join karate clubs." Jihadists were especially encouraged 
to join the Dutch army in order to receive proper military training. 

By 2002 Dutch police estimated that the Taliban movement in Afghanistan could count 
on some one thousand sympathizers in the Netherlands, some of whom served on the 
boards that governed the activities of Islamic schools. The number seemed small, but in 
Amsterdam, where 88,000 Muslims constituted 13 percent of its 600,000 inhabitants, 
there was deep concern by many Dutch that, given the high birth-rate among Muslims, 
in twenty years half of all children under the age of eighteen would be Muslim. [5681 
Anti-Muslim sentiment played a significant role in the election of the flamboyant Pym 
Fortuyn, a politician who was often labeled a bigot or racist for expressing the opinion 
that Muslim immigrants were playing too great a role in Dutch affairs. He appealed to 
those Dutch who wanted to limit or halt entirely Muslim immigration and prevent any 
aspects of the Shari'a creeping into Dutch law. Not surprisingly, he received 
widespread support in Rotterdam. Stung by the growing enthusiasm for Fortuyn, Dutch 
officials began to investigate Islamic schools, to discover that many were funded by an 
"intolerant Islamic foundation in Saudi Arabia," others had ties to HAMAS, and most 
were supported by other Islamic charities. "It has become evident that the objectives of 
the World Islamic Call Society, the Al Waqf al Islam Foundation, and the Diyanet [the 
Government of Turkey religious affairs directorate for 320,000 Turks in Holland] are 
damaging the Dutch democratic order." [5691 In May 2002 Fortuyn was assassinated by 
an ethnic Dutch animal rights activist who was, to the great relief of politicians and 
public alike, neither Muslim nor an immigrant. 

Although many Dutch regarded Fortuyn's assassination an aberration, they could no 
longer remain indifferent or tolerant after a second political murder. The people of the 
Netherlands were deeply shocked by the November 2004 assassination of the 
well-known provocative film director Theo van Gogh, and by the way it was done. A 
twenty-six-year-old jallaba-c\ad Moroccan, Muhammad Bouyeri, emptied a magazine of 
bullets into his victim, stabbed him as he lay dying, and then finished by leaving a note 
pinned to his body with a knife. He had been murdered as he was cycling to his studio 



to edit a film about Pirn Fortuyn. Van Gogh had been an outspoken critic of Islam, and 
had called the radical Islamists "a fifth column of goatfuckers." The assassin was 
arrested along with another thirteen Islamists, all of whom were members of the "Hofstad 
Network" whose spiritual leader was a forty-three-year-old Syrian, Redouan Issar. 

The gulf between the 16 million ethnic Dutch and 1 million Muslims now appeared 
irreparable. "The jihad has come to the Netherlands," declared Jozias van Aartsen, a 
leading Christian Democrat. Mosques and Muslim schools that were attacked retaliated 
with strikes against Christian churches and street battles in The Hague. The government 
tightened immigration controls, but many Dutch were convinced that the idea of building 
a multicultural society had failed. Their solution was integration. Thus, it was now high 
time for the 1 million Dutch Muslims, 95 percent of whom were moderates, to isolate 
some 50,000 potential Islamists by adopting the Dutch language, culture, and way of life 
- voluntarily or, if necessary, by force. On 23 December 2004 the Dutch Ministry of the 
Interior did the unthinkable by publicly singling out the Muslim community in an AIVD 
report, From Dawa to Jihad, describing militant Islam and examining how to meet its very 
serious threat to Dutch societv. [5701 

In Belgium, virtually no effort was made by the authorities to investigate Muslim 
organizations The government, in fact, was even more resolute than the French in its 
support of the Palestinians and was one of the few that publicly criticized the USA for its 
tough stand on terrorism. Although there were active Al Qaeda cells in Belgium, the 
government only moved to close them down or extradite their leaders when it could no 
longer ignore their presence. Meanwhile, the government continued to support the 
Executive Commission for Belgian Muslims financially. [5711 An example of the 
unwillingness of the Belgian authorities to crack down on radical Islamists or their 
charities was its reluctance to interfere in the activities of Fondation Secours Mondial 
(FSM), the GRF branch in Belgium. It had been the recipient of some $600,000, which 
was later used in support of an Al Qaeda network managed by the Syrian businessman 
Muhammad Zouaydi, a "senior Bin Ladin financier." On another occasion, $205,853 
was sent to Nabil Sayadi (aka Abu Zaynab), the GRF Director of Operations for Europe 
and "the head of the Global Relief Operations in Belgium. " 15721 After Sayadi had 
opened the GRF office in Belgium, between 1995 and 2001 he handled $1.6 million, half 
of which came from the Chicago office. Although Belgian authorities would eventually 
freeze the GRF accounts, no criminal charges were brought against Sayadi or the 
charity. Instead, Sayadi was granted Belgian citizenship despite the fact that he was a 
close friend of Rabih Haddad, another notorious Al Qaeda member and GRF official 
arrested in the USA in 2002. The Belgian authorities did not appear to appreciate 
creeping terrorism in Europe even after the attack on the Belgian consulate in 
Casablanca in May 2003. "The fact that the terrorists tried to attack the diplomatic 
facility of one of the most Muslim friendly countries in the West should make it clear that 
they do not hate the West for its alleged pro Israel bias or its colonial past: They simply 
hate it for what it is and for the values for which it stands. " [5731 Liberal Belgium could 
escape neither its European heritage nor its Christian past, even in denial. 

Despite the growing Muslim unrest in Belgium's major cities, its politicians and media 
refused to be drawn into the debate over Muslim immigration that was sweeping through 
Europe Belgians have been proud to welcome the surge of immigrants from Muslim 
countries during the past forty years. However, there now exists a second generation of 
Muslims, many born in Belgium, who, unlike their parents, have found acculturation 
difficult or even impossible. Not surprisingly, they too demand Islamic schools and the 



acceptance of Arabic as multilingual Belgium's fourth official language, even though its 
400,000 Muslims comprise only 5 percent of the population. Whether the government 
wished to acknowledge it or not, "Belgium was a recruiting ground for Islamic militants 
with at least one in ten mosques used to spread anti Western ideas." 

The radical Islmists were concentrated mostly in Antwerp, the home of AEL where its 
leader, the Hizbullah mujahid Dyab Abu Jahjah, advocated "a form of separatism for 
Belgian Muslims." They believed time was on their side, for "fifty seven percent of the 
children born in Brussels are Muslims, which means that Belgium will be a completely 
different country in a few decades. "[574] AEL led marches, inflamed Muslims by 
preaching anti-Semitism, and opened its first branch in the Netherlands, which many in 
Holland thought "ill considered. "[5751 Moreover, the Belgian government, despite 
appeals from Washington, refused to take any action against GRF. I5761 After all, a 
royal decree had recognized Islam as a religion respected in the country and 
recognized in its laws. Some 800 Muslim teachers had been appointed by the Executive 
Commission for Belgian Muslims despite the fact that thirty of the 300 mosques in 
Belgium were dominated by Islamists who openly supported Bin Laden and Salafists. 
However, liberal Belgium has not been without its anti-immigrant faction. The Vlaams 
Blok Party, the most popular party in Flanders, particularly in Antwerp and Mechelen, 
was determined to halt the flood of immigrants and to curtail the benefits automatically 
granted to Muslims once they reach Belgium, legally or illegally. Still, the mainstream 
parties have resisted working with its leaders and on 9 November 2004 the Belgian 
Appeal Court banned the party for violating anti-racism laws. 

Like the Netherlands and Belgium, Denmark had to confront many of the same 
problems produced by Muslim immigration. It had a substratum of Salafist clerics and a 
very active Islamic Center that opened in 1999 and was financed by the Shaykh Zayed 
bin Sultan al-Nahayyan Charitable and Humanitarian Foundation of the UAE. 
Throughout the 1990s Denmark had been a popular stopover for Al Qaeda members 
and for a time the residence of Ayman al-Zawahiri. During the European crackdown on 
the Al Aqsa Charity Foundation after 9/11, however, the Copenhagen police seized 
$539,000 from Al Aqsa that had been collected from Muslims in Denmark and used by 
the charity to finance terrorist operations in the Middle East.[577] In February 2003 the 
director of the Al Nur Islamic Information office was arrested in Denmark for 
photographing sensitive security installations. The A Nur press was used by such 
radicals as the Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi to spread the Takfiri ideology, the 
ultimate Salafist doctrine. The Hizb ut-Tahrir in Denmark also underwent a lengthy probe 
resulting from certain anti-Semitic statements, even though there were only 6,000 Jews 
in Denmark among the 5.4 million Danes and 200,000 Muslims. The case was 
dismissed by the Justice Ministry in January 2004 after an eighteen-month 
investigation, but Muslim immigration was a major issue in the Danish elections that 
resulted in a center-right coalition defeating the Socialists for the first time in more than 
seventy years. To become a permanent resident an immigrant must now live in Denmark 
for seven years, and in 2004 a fifteen-year-old agreement that permitted the Turkish 
Dayanetto send imams to Denmark was canceled. [5781 



The United Kingdom 



Prior to 9/1 1 the UK had already established a system for the regulation of charities 



far superior to any other country in Europe. The Charity Commission for England and 
Wales was granted extensive regulatory powers, including the ability to audit, review 
correspondence, freeze bank accounts, remove directors, and investigate and rectify 
the misuse of funds. Similar regulatory powers devolved to the Scottish Charities Office 
and in Northern Ireland to the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Department for 
Social Development. In the early 1990s the authorities were permitted to investigate 
charities that might be involved with terrorist organizations, and they could request 
criminal prosecution if warranted. Between 1980 and 2000 Islamic charities sprouted 
like mushrooms. Among the many, the Kurdish Cultural Centre (KCC) was created in 
1985: the Al Furkan Islamic Heritage Foundation in 1988; the Waqf Al Birr Education 
Trust in 1992; the United Kingdom Islamic Education Foundation in 1994. Muslim Aid, 
established in 1985, assisted Muslim victims of poverty, war, and natural disasters. 
Islamic Relief Worldwide of the UK, founded in Birmingham in 1984, concentrated on 
international relief and development in response to famines in Ethiopia and the Sudan. 
Muslim Hands was established in 1993 to help the needy of the world by medical and 
educational programs and emergency relief. The IQRA Trust Prisoners' Welfare worked 
to promote a better understanding of the needs of Muslim inmates in British prisons. 
Muslim immigrants were responsible for the creation of the Yemeni Development Forum, 
a non-profit British-registered organization determined to alleviate poverty and enhance 
development. The Turkish Advisory and Welfare Centre assisted the Turkish community 
in the Lewisham Borough with health services, education, welfare, and housing. By 
9/11, Muslim charities in the UK were many and varied, and much of their work was 
devoted to religious education and the strengthening of the Muslim identity. 

One of the oldest charities in the UK is the Welfare Association (Ta'awoun), a private, 
non-profit foundation established in 1983 in Geneva with offices in the UK. For years it 
sustained Palestinian emigrants in the Diaspora. Likewise, the Palestine Relief and 
Development Fund (INTERPAL), a non-political, non-profit, and independent charitable 
organization concerned with providing support for poor and needy Palestinians in the 
West Bank, Gaza Strip, and refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. Medical Aid for 
Palestine (MAP) was a UK charity established in 1984 to provide medical facilities to the 
survivors of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camp massacres in West Beirut. Save the 
Children charity had created Eye to Eye, a well-known NGO that gave assistance to 
young Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank funded by the 
International Programme of the National Lottery Charities Board. 

The proliferation of Islamic charities went largely unnoticed in Britain because officials 
were confident their monitoring was very effective; thus they saw no cause for alarm. 
Nevertheless, even among the best Islamic charities there were those that became 
"problems" and required careful surveillance. First and foremost was Islamic Relief 
Worldwide. A welfare organization founded in 1984 by Dr. Hany El Banna with 
headquarters in Birmingham and linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, it maintained 
regional offices in Albania, in the north Caucasus, and in Montreuil, a Paris suburb and 
home to many Algerian Salafists. The Director of the A Haramain Foundation, Khaled 
al-Fawaz, was regularly questioned by Scotland Yard after September 1998.15791 The 
website azzam.com was located in the UK, and it shopped for funds with the appeal that 
the Taliban needed to raise $10 million a month "in order to repel a chemical weapons 
attack on Afghanistan by the United States." The site was managed by Babar Ahmad, 
who was later arrested and faced extradition charges related to "soliciting funds for use 
in terrorism. " [580] Established in 1984, Islamic Relief Worldwide was collecting 



donations as early as 1988 to support Muslim refugees fleeing Serbia. It opened an 
office in Albania in 1992 where it provided for refugees. In 1999 alone it had closely 
supervised the distribution of more than £1.8 million ($3.4 million) for food, clothing, 
bedding, and medical supplies, and at one time it met the needs of about 5,000 
refugees at a camp in Shkodre, Albania. Muslim Aid also collected donations from a 
broad spectrum of donors - mosques, Jewish centers, and Christian charities - in 
support of Kosovar refugees. In 1989 alone it allocated £1.5 million ($2.8 million) for 
food and medicines to assist refugees in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. [581] 

While the Charity Commission could monitor Islamic charities in the UK, the 
authorities had less success in keeping track of dubious individuals who took advantage 
of the ease with which Islamists from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kashmir, and India 
obtained political asylum in Britain. Newcomers could disappear in mosques, madrasas, 
and charities and attract little attention. For example, in December 1995 British police 
raided the London residence of an Algerian expatriate who had "disappeared." There 
they found communications from GIA, already suspected of seven bombings in France 
that had killed seven and wounded 180, and bank transfers that were traced to 
Khartoum and the headquarters of Osama bin Laden. 

When the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights was banned by Saudi 
Arabia in May 1993, Muhammad al-Maasari, its founder, moved the organization to 
London. Here Maasari was joined by Kahled al-Fawaz from Khartoum, and the two 
began to receive substantial funding from unknown sources. They created a radical 
Islamist telecommunications network that, among other things, translated and distributed 
Osama bin Laden's 1996 fatwa declaring war against the USA. Maasari, however, was 
not the only friend Osama bin Laden had in London. Abu Qutada, born Omar Mahmud 
Othman on 13 December 1960, was a Palestinian of Jordanian origin and a veteran of 
the Afghan war. In London he directed the recruitment for Al Qaeda and became the 
spiritual leader of GIA. In the late 1990s he edited the Islamist journal AlAnsar, and was 
a close associate of Abu Dahdeh, the leader of the Al Qaeda cell in Spain. In London 
Abu Qutada made no effort to disguise his belief that Islamic charity should be given 
directly to support mujahideen and not to the mosques. When Abu Qutada was finally 
arrested in South London in October 2002 the police found $200,000 in cash; he was 
thought to have been the mastermind behind the transfer of funds from European 
terrorist cells to mujahideen and was wanted in France and Spain. The British 
authorities confiscated his passport and placed him in detention without trial. 

Dr. Ayub Thakur, Kashmiri expatriate and President of the World Kashmir Freedom 
Movement, arrived in London in 1986 and soon became the director of Mercy 
International Relief Organization (MIRO) in the UK. Registered in Switzerland and led by 
Sahid Shaykh, MIRO had been used as cover by Al Qaeda terrorists who bombed the 
US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In 1993 Thakur was accused by the government 
of India of funding Kashmiri mujahideen, and he was implicated in a spate of hawala 
scandals that had plagued India. His passport was impounded in the UK, and after his 
death in March 2004, the British Charity Commission decided to investigate the 
questionable movement of MIRO funds, especially to its office in Srinagar.[582] Other 
charities were dealt with more severely. In 2002 the International Development 
Foundation was closed because of its ties to Osama bin Laden, and one of its donors, 
Khaled bin Mahfouz, was labeled "not the sort of person we would want connected to a 
charity in this country. " [5831 Outlawed in Israel in 1997 for supplying support to 
HAMAS, the UK INTERPAL office was named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist 



organization and closed, and in October 2002 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon 
Brown, froze the accounts of BIF UK, which was "extensively" involved in fundraising in 
support of international terrorism. 

Following 9/11 the public learned that many young British Muslims had died in 
Afghanistan, fighting alongside the Taliban. Scores had traveled to Kabul, many 
explaining to friends that they were involved in "humanitarian work." In the UK itself, 
Pakistanis were generally opposed to that war; in one poll taken, 90 percent of 
respondents claimed they would not take up arms for the UK, although half said they 
would do so for Islam. [5841 The Pakistani-dominated and self-selected Muslim Council 
of Britain, founded in 1997 and considered the voice of moderate Islam, was then 
scrutinized by the authorities. Subsequently, it was found that the organization, which 
sponsored numerous charitable works, was in fact closely tied to the radical 
Jama'at-i-lslami of Pakistan. 



Finsbury Park Mosque 

After 9/11 Scotland Yard became ever more interested in Al Muhajiroun (the 
Emigrants, AM), a charitable society founded in the UK on 16 February 1996 by a 
Syrian, Omar Bakri Muhammad. Educated at Al Azhar and a Muslim Brother, Omar 
Bakri had been expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1986. He took refuge in Britain where he 
and Farid Kasim, a fellow Syrian, founded Hizb ut-Tahrir UK. They soon had the 
reputation "as the most vocal, visible, and active Islamist organizers in the UK," 
particularly on university campuses. Bakri split from the Hizb ut-Tahrir movement in 
1996 when he founded AM. He became its self-proclaimed spiritual leader and by 1997 
was widely known as the "Tottenham Ayatollah." Bakri established a National Da'wa 
Committee, proclaimed himself "a judge of the self styled British Court of Shariah," and 
founded Al Khilafah Publications. Numerous AM fronts were founded, including the 
Society of Muslim Lawyers and the Society of Converts to Islam. Dummy corporations 
were created, including Info 2000 Software for "raising money through donations." It 
and the Muslim Cultural Society of Enfield and Haringey, a registered charity 
established in May 1994, were closed by British authorities in November 1999. AM 
jihadists were "taught by the organization that Israel, the Jews and the West are evil and 
that it is their Muslim duty to fight them. " [5851 The center of AM activity was the 
Finsbury Mosque Trust, a registered charity located in north London. 

The Trust was registered in August 1988, "to advance and promote the knowledge of 
the religion of Islam in the UK and abroad." Nearly a decade later, in May 1998, when 
the Charity Commission sought to investigate complaints about the Trust, the 
commissioners were not allowed to enter the mosque to evaluate the collection of funds 
raised during Friday and other prayer meetings. Investigators found Muslims living in 
the mosque itself in violation of the terms of the Trust. In fact, the Finsbury Park Mosque 
had been occupied by an Egyptian, Abu Hamza al-Masri (aka Mustafa Kemal), a 
jihadist and founder of the Supporters of Sharia and AM. Abu Hamza, a one-eyed 
fanatic who had lost both hands in Afghanistan, issued tapes, gave fiery sermons at 
Friday prayers, and recruited jihadists prepared to kill westerners living in Muslim 
countries. He used the dilapidated Finsbury Park Mosque for meetings of Supporters of 
Sharia and AM that were political rather than charitable. Outsiders were not welcome. In 
June 1998 an inquiry was begun by the Charity Commission, and by November it had 



obtained an agreement with Abu Hamza to return the mosque to its trustees on the 
condition that he be permitted to preach. 

Even before 9/11, the UK had received scores of protests from foreign governments, 
both in the West and in the Middle East, concerning "Britain's protection of, and refusal 
to extradite, known terrorists." The government appeared "to have taken the view that 
Islamic terrorism affected Israel and the Arab countries, but not Britain, so Britain could 
afford to ignore it." Former Taliban were "being accorded not just asylum, but British 
taxpayer legal aid, to claim, and be granted 'asylum' in Britain. "1586] After 9/11, 
however, the Charity Commission hurriedly undertook inquiries into the activities of a 
number of Muslim charities - the Margate Muslim Association, Muslim Girls' and Young 
Women's Association, the Muslim Cultural Society of Enfield and Haringey, the 
Ahmadiyya Muslim Association, Muslim Welfare House, the Muslim Association of 
Thanet, and finally the Finsbury Park Mosque. Within a month of 9/11 the Charity 
Commission had received a tape of an Abu Hamza sermon that "was of such an 
extreme and political nature as to conflict with the charitable status of the Mosque." Still 
the government refused to close it down. Instead, the feckless mosque trustees were 
ordered to prevent Abu Hamza from using it for political activities. Finally, in April 2002 
Abu Hamza was "suspended," and the mosque's bank account with Barclays Bank PLC 
frozen, but Abu Hamza continued to live in the mosque. 

By January 2003 the British government had lost all patience with Abu Hamza and the 
trustees. Police raided the mosque, to discover it was being used to support terrorist 
activity - which should have come as no surprise. The Charity Commission declared 
that the Finsbury Park Mosque trustees "had lost effective control," for Abu Hamza and 
his supporters contemptuously ignored them while planning and participating in illegal 
activities. The trustees had not been allowed to audit financial transactions, "nor did they 
possess the accounting records needed to enable them to compile accounts" despite 
the Commission's orders in September 1999 that such records be made available to the 
trustees. [5871 Despite an official government report that claimed "the UK is recognized 
to have one of the best systems for regulating charities in the world," the government 
remained reluctant to end activities in the mosques that supported the Islamist 
jihadists. [5881 Instead, it created two new security agencies: a branch of the traditional 
security service (MIS) and the National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit (NTFIU) 
within the Special Branch at New Scotland Yard to assist the Terrorist Finance Unit of 
the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), which was determined to staunch the 
flow of funds to terrorist organizations. "After eavesdropping for months on his nightly 
praise of the 9/11 highjackers and of suicide bombings," by January 2005 Scotland 
Yard's patience was finally exhausted, and it decided to deport the leader of AM, the 
largest Muslim organization in the UK, known simply as Shaykh Omar. [589] By 2004 the 
UK had frozen the assets of more than a hundred organizations, mostly charities, and 
200 individuals. [5901 Finally, Abu Hamza himself was arrested in May 2004 in response 
to a warrant of extradition by the USA. On 19 October 2004, he was charged in a 
sixteen-count indictment of "soliciting or encouraging persons [jihadists] to murder those 
who did not believe in Islam. " [5911 

Yet some good came out of the Finsbury Park follies. The trustees of all British 
charities with incomes over £10,000 per annum have ten months from the end of the 
charity's fiscal year to submit its audited accounts to the Commission. Ostensibly, any 
charity that does not meet its legal obligations is subject to closure. Moreover, the UK 
has strongly supported the UN Counter Terrorism Committee and provides it technical 



assistance, and the Philippines, for one, has asked the British Charity Commission to 
help them create its own organization to emulate the British in controlling its charities. 
Still, in the UK problems continued to surface. In February 2005 the US Treasury listed 
the Birmingham-based Islamic Relief Agency (IRSA) for reportedly funding both Al 
Qaeda and HAMAS. Although it had long-standing ties to the notorious Islamic African 
Relief Agency (and was considered its successor), the IRSA office in the UK continued 
to function as British officials undertook their own investigation. 

Despite these warnings the British public continued to believe that they were immune 
to Muslim extremists, and that their relationship with the Muslim immigrant community 
was one of mutual respect and appreciation for Britain's willingness to give generous 
asylum to Muslims thereafter protected by the fortress of British law. This complacency 
was shattered suddenly and violently during the morning rush hour of 7 July 2005 when 
three bombs exploded on the London Underground and a fourth on a bus, killing 56 
people and injuring another 700. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility. On 21 July a second 
series of explosions erupted, but miraculously there were no fatalities or injuries. As in 
the USA after 9/1 1 and the swift passage of the Patriot Act, Prime Minister Tony Blair 
immediately proposed a raft of stringent anti-terrorism measures. Whether and in what 
form this controversial legislation is enacted, there now remains widespread agreement 
in the public, press, and Parliament that Britain cannot return to the blissful days before 
7/7. 



Chapter 11 Islamic charities in North America 



0, brothers, after Afghanistan, nothing in the world is impossible for us anymore. 
There are no superpowers or mini-powers - what matters is the will power that 
springs from our religious belief. 

Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, Islamic training center, Oklahoma City, 1988 15921 



The few Americans present at the meeting between President Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt and King Saud bin Abd al-Aziz al-Saud aboard the USS Quincy in Great Bitter 
Lake in the Suez Canal on 14 February 1945 did not realize that it was the beginning of 
a political tapestry between the USA and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that would build, 
fray, but never unravel in an alliance that would endure for more than fifty years. 
Although the US Department of State has been much involved in the affairs of the Middle 
East since that meeting, by and large Americans have paid little attention to the growing 
Saudi influence or the Islamic presence in their country. 

In 1970 the Islamic Center of Washington DC was the only mosque in the greater 
Washington area; a quarter-century later a network of mosques had been established 
around the capital. In the Dar Al Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church and the Islamic Center 
in Herndon the faithful listened to clerics preaching in the revolutionary tradition of the 
thirteenth-century Islamist Ibn Tamiyya for Muslims to return to the purity and virtue of 
early Islam. [5931 As elsewhere in the non-Islamic world, the financial foundations for 
this expanding Islamic network came from Saudi Arabia. In the USA and Canada an 
estimated 8 percent of all Islamic establishments received some Saudi financial support 
for many years. The Muslim Students' Association of the United States and Canada 
(MSA) was founded with Saudi money as a branch of MWL and consequently was 
Wahhabi in its propagation of Islam from its chapters in some 175 colleges and 
universities. [5941 By 1995 the MSA website at Ohio State University was computer 
friendly and Salafist in tone and message. MSA also helped to raise money for a 
number of Muslim charities that were later accused of being fronts for financing 
terrorism abroad. 

The radicalization of the campus chapters and young Muslims who had previously 
been concerned with good works, religious studies, and leftist international politics was 
now being undertaken by Salafist Islamists whose influence spread from MSA into other 
hitherto benign Islamic organizations, including the important Islamic Society of North 
America (ISNA). ISNA operated more than 320 of the 1,200 mosques in the USA, and 
the important Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), both of which were 
beholden to the Saudi Arabian embassy. [595] By the mid-1990s, however, MSA had 
become thoroughly infiltrated by Salafist radicals hostile to the Saudi royal family, and 
they were moving the goals of MSA in a direction hostile to their Wahhabi paymasters. 
By 9/11 the majority of MSA chapters had been taken over by Islamists and were 
anti-American and anti-Saudi royal family; their agenda exuded intolerance and rejected 
American values. Even after 9/11 when MSA sought to moderate its image, it was 
difficult to reverse course given the strident rhetoric that dominated its meetings and its 
computer website. In the USA the tragic events of 9/11 dramatically destroyed the 



tolerant complacency toward Islam. New initiatives were devised to make America more 
secure, and Title III of the Patriot Act enacted on 26 October 2001 included specific 
provisions against money-laundering and terrorist financing that soon led investigators 
to Islamic charities. 



Investigating charities 

Despite a 1996 anti-terrorism law that made it a crime to provide material support to 
any group designated a terrorist organization, the investigations of suspect Muslim 
charities were few and prosecutions rare. Grand juries had been impaneled in Illinois, 
New York, and Texas, but the only indictments issued prior to 9/11 were against those 
refusing to testify. It was only in the immediate aftermath of 9/1 1 that the White House 
moved with alacrity to freeze the assets of Muslim charities. Executive Order 13224, 
signed on 23 September 2001 by President George W. Bush, invoked the International 
Emergency Economic Powers Act and thereby established the legal framework needed 
to investigate the active terrorist infrastructure in the USA. Another executive order 
authorized US financial institutions to issue "blocking orders" that froze the assets of 
321 individuals and organizations amounting to some $125 million. Included were those 
Islamic charities affected by 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Code that 
governs non-profit charitable or educational institutions. The Treasury Department 
specifically sought the financial records of eight Islamic charities including those of 
Islamic Relief Worldwide of Burbank, the Islamic Center in Tucson, Care International, 
Inc. (no relationship to CARE International) of Boston, GRF, BIF, and the Islamic 
Association for Palestine (IAP), all with offices in Illinois. Banks and financial institutions 
that, wittingly or unwittingly, supported terrorist organizations were investigated, and 
state association regulators were instructed to maintain files on charities that would 
include income tax returns, state incorporation records, and audits, if any. 

In a curious way, the very secular IRS publicly supports one of the essential pillars of 
Islam, zakat. Just like zakat committees, IRS permits US citizens giving to worthy causes 
a financial deduction not dissimilar to the annual voluntary contribution of zakat. These 
alms, for that is what they are, can be donated to support religion, education, 
citizenship, veterans' groups, public health, combat disease, etc., but the recipient 
charities must submit a yearly tax return open to public scrutiny. Ironically, government 
prosecutors had long used charges of racketeering and tax evasion against drug 
traffickers and mafia bosses that could now be used against directors of charities. Yet 
to investigate a well-known drug lord or mafia chieftain was one thing; to examine the 
books of religious charities was quite another. To apply such statutes to any religious 
denomination was virtually unheard of, and it troubled those determined to maintain the 
separation between church and state, defend religious freedom, and preserve the 
human rights of religious donors. Moreover, the silent invasion of Islamic charities had 
largely gone unnoticed by a government that only kept data on legal immigrants by 
country and knew virtually nothing about its Muslim community. For years the 
government had failed to investigate any linkage between questionable donations and 
Islamic charities, especially since the Muslim community was evolving into a powerful 
voting bloc in the USA with Muslims numbering some 5.2 million in 1991 and more than 
8 million a decade later. Moreover, the investigation of suspected Islamic charities was 
no easy task. There were more than 1,200 mosques/Islamic centers and 426 Muslim 



associations in the USA, and most were actively collecting and distributing zakat and 
sadaqa. [5961 Virtually every major Islamic charitable institution in the USA and Canada, 
however, had been infiltrated by Islamists. Thus, the Holy Land Fund for Relief and 
Development (Holy Land Foundation, HLF) of Texas, BIF, Al-Nasr International, and 
GRF all of Illinois, World and Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE) of Florida, Islamic 
African Relief Agency (IARA) of Missouri, the Al Haramain Foundation of Oregon, the 
Islamic Assembly of North America of Michigan, and the SAAR Foundation of Virginia 
would all be investigated. 

Ironically, in 1999 the Muslim community had presented the Clinton administration with 
guidelines acceptable to the Islamic charities. They would have strengthened mainline 
Muslims against the increasing attacks upon them by the Islamists. The leaders of the 
Muslim community were willing to adopt "a policy of complete transparency," and they 
appeared "eager to show the government where their money comes from and what they 
use it for. "[597] The move was long overdue. An effort had been made in 1993 to 
identify those charities connected with HAMAS, but the subsequent investigation by the 
FBI elicited no change in policy or action. [5981 In 1995 President Clinton was urged to 
create a "President's List" of terrorist organizations, "their members and donors," and to 
warn the Muslim community that "well intentioned donations" could be funneled to 
terrorist groups. A year later he was advised to prohibit certain Islamist fundraising 
Clinton rejected these recommendations, and FBI agents "were prevented from opening 
either criminal or national-security cases," for fear that such activities would be 
regarded as "profiling Islamic charities. " [5991 And when the Muslim community again 
came forward after 9/11 seeking "federally sanctioned guidelines" in order "to conduct a 
thorough legal and financial audit, one that will provide a clean bill of health," nothing 
happened. [6001 

In designing anti-terrorist legislation Congress has relied heavily on the annual State 
Department report. Patterns of Global Terrorism. First published in October 1986, it listed 
and described worldwide state-sponsored terrorism and terrorist organizations. In 
addition, the State Department issued other occasional reports including a 1996 short 
history on Osama bin Laden. After 9/11 the FBI and the Treasury Department, both of 
which had been slow to gather data on Islamists in the USA, quickly joined the hunt for 
terrorists. [6011 Unfortunately, many Muslims in America regarded the government attack 
on suspicious Islamic charities as an attack on Islam. Charity is one of the most 
respected basic tenets of Islam, and by closing its charities the government had given 
Americans the false impression that American Muslims were supporting terrorists. It had 
also given the Muslim world a similarly false impression that America was intolerant of a 
religious minority. 

There was a danger that the American public would lump all Muslim charities in the 
same boat, but questions were bound to surface that demanded answers: Did suspected 
officials of the various charities know one another? Did they coordinate their efforts? 
Was there a larger conspiracy at work in the USA? In fact, many Islamists did indeed 
know one another. They met at important gatherings held in New York in 1988 and 
Chicago in December 1989 at a meeting sponsored by the Islamic Committee for 
Palestine (ICP) attended by Bashir Nafi, a founder of El J, and Abd al-Aziz Odeh, the 
financial and spiritual leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ). All the major Islamists 
visited the USA, including Ayman al-Zawahiri on numerous occasions and Hasan 
al-Turabi at Tampa and Washington DC in 1992. Musa Abu Marzouk lived in the USA; 
Abdullah bin Laden and Shaykh Abd al-Rahman were regulars at various conferences; 



Shaykh Qaradawi attended the HAMAS Conference in Kansas City in 1989; Shaykh 
Abdullah Azzam arrived at an Islamic training center at Oklahoma City in 1988, and 
Shaykh Mubarik Ali Gilan, a Pakistani visitor and founder of the radical Muslims of the 
Americas, arrived in 1990. Shaykhs Zindani and Maasari were rumored to have visited 
the USA on fundraising missions at one time or another prior to 9/1 1 . Only Osama bin 
Laden stayed away, first because he was building an organization, originally in 
Afghanistan and then in the Sudan, and also because he may have been "spooked" by 
being named a co-conspirator in the March 1993 World Trade center bombing. 

When the Bush administration froze the assets of BIF, GRF, and HLF, other Muslim 
leaders were concerned that the Muslim community would reduce its charitable giving. 
When HLF was investigated at Rancho Penasquitos, San Diego, California, it was 
regarded as an affront to the imam, Mohammad al-Mezain, Director of the prosperous 
American Muslim Coalition of San Diego county, with fourteen mosques and 100,000 
Muslims. Al-Mezain was recognized as a popular HAMAS fundraiser, and for years the 
American Muslim Coalition of San Diego had sent its Islam Report to likeminded internet 
websites, listing its bank account for potential donations.[602] This was an expensive 
operation, and any diminution of funds was bound to curtail its numerous questionable 
activities. 



BIF and GRF£6031 

The Benevolence International Foundation (BIF) was a derivative of the Islamic 
Benevolence Committee (Lajnat al-Birr al-lslamiyya, LBI), one of the thirteen major 
Middle Eastern charities in Peshawar in the 1980s. Founded around 1987 by Saudi 
Shaykh Adil Galil Abdul Batargy, it maintained branches in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. 
"One of the purposes of LBI was to raise funds in Saudi Arabia to provide support for 
the mujahideen then fighting in Afghanistan" and to provide "cover for fighters to travel 
in and out of Pakistan and obtain immigration status. "[6041 BIF was constituted in the 
USA in 1992 when a Syrian Afghan-Arab, Enaam Arnaout, opened an office of the 
Islamic Benevolence Committee (IBC) in Plantation, Florida; the name was soon 
changed to the original Benevolence International Foundation (BIF). In Florida Arnaout 
married an American woman, thereby obtaining US citizenship, and moved BIF 
headquarters to Chicago in 1992 and began to collect funds for Al Qaeda - supposedly 
to purchase food for families impacted by wars in Afghanistan and the Balkans. 

In December 2001 US agents raided the Chicago office of BIF but found little more 
than videos and literature glorifying martyrdom. In January 2002 Bosnian authorities, 
working on information from the USA, searched the BIF office in Sarajevo and seized 
weapons, booby-traps, false passports, and plans for making bombs. They also 
discovered the seminal historical document that described "the origins, growth and 
expansion of his al-Qaida network in the 1980s and 1990s" and the close relationship 
between Arnaout and Bin Laden. Another document, entitled "Osama's history," 
disclosed that "Al Qaida military leaders were paid salaries from Muslim charity 
proceeds and purchased weapons with money from charity leaders." Other handwritten 
notes provided a detailed description of the founding of Al Qaeda, including minutes of 
the 11 August 1988 meeting in which Bin Laden and his associates discussed the 
establishment of a new militant group. Quotations from Bin Laden's own statements 
included one boasting that Al Qaeda had received "huge gains" from Saudi donors. In 



April Arnaout was arrested for denying under oath that he had ties to terrorists. There 
was no longer any doubt that Arnaout was an Al Kifah veteran, associate, and long-time 
friend of Bin Laden. 

In October 2002 Enaam Arnaout was charged with conspiracy to provide material 
support for terrorists. He had signed documents listing a senior Al Qaeda member, 
Mamdouh Salim, as a BIF director when the latter traveled to Bosnia, and Mohammed 
Bayazid, a Bin Laden agent seeking to procure nuclear and chemical weapons for Al 
Qaeda, had used the BIF address as his residence on an application for a driver's 
license. A month later BIF was listed on the Terrorist Designation Lists. [6051 In 
February 2003 Arnaout pleaded guilty to providing boots, tents, and uniforms for rebels 
in Chechnya and Bosnia, but a plea bargain dropped the charges related to Al Qaeda 
and the prospect of a long prison term. In return Arnaout agreed to provide prosecutors 
with a history of Al Qaeda and the jihadist presence in the USA and abroad. When 
Arnaout was sentenced in 2003 to eleven years in federal prison for defrauding donors, 
a supercilious judge gave him a longer term than the eight to ten years in the sentencing 
guidelines because he "deprived needy refugees of important aid. " [6061 

In July 2003 Rabih Sami Haddad, a Lebanese citizen, was ordered to be deported 
from the USA. Haddad was the co-founder of the international Global Relief Foundation 
(GRF) and another Afghan-Arab who had been closely associated with MAK and 
Shaykh Azzam in Peshawar. At the end of the war in Afghanistan he had moved to 
Kuwait. There he conceived of a new charitable foundation. Using an associate, 
Muhammad Chehade, GRF opened for business in suburban Chicago in 1992. The 
following year Haddad moved to Chicago to become the Chairman of GRF. In the first 
year GRF collected over $700,000, and during its first ten years raised about $20 
million. The charity had received $3.6 million in 2001 alone, and when its accounts were 
frozen, it had over $900,000 in cash and tangible assets of $1.7 million. In December 
2001 a presidential executive order was issued against GRF accusing the charity of 
diverting contributions to help bankroll terrorism; between June 2000 and September 
2001 GRF had received $1.4 million in wire transfers from a Swiss bank that was 
"co-mingled" with funds collected in the USA. Haddad was arrested in December 2001 
and accused of having links to the Al Qaeda network. Never charged, after being held 
for a year he was deported by an Immigration Court judge in November 2002 and sent 
to Lebanon. [6071 In addition, the Treasury Department was convinced that GRF had 
close ties to Al Qaeda and to Wadih al-Hage, previously convicted of being involved in 
the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ironically, reporters 
from the New York Times were subject to investigation by the FBI because they may 
have alerted the GRF office the day before it was raided by federal agents. Whoever 
tipped them off, the charity staff shredded many documents, destroying incriminating 
evidence. [6081 A year later, in November 2002, GRF was officially designated a 
financier of terrorism by the Treasury Department and so charged under Executive 
Order 13224. It was also bankrupt. 



Al Kifah and Al Haramain 

Although many have perceived a vast conspiracy involving Islamic charities, neither in 
the USA nor Europe has anyone unearthed any grand design that united all 
questionable charitable activities in a single conspiratorial purpose Much of the belief in 



an Islamic conspiracy was generated by the fact that the leading Islamists lived in a 
closed world in which they all knew one another, attended conferences together, and 
communicated among themselves to raise funds for common causes such as HAMAS 
or Al Qaeda. The futile pursuit of that elusive conspiracy began at the Islamic Center of 
Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1971 by Muslim students at the University of Arizona, it 
was the first American Islamic charitable institution to provide direct support to the 
Afghan-Arabs in Peshawar. By 1986 the Center had become closely associated with 
the Al Kifah movement founded in Pakistan, and its Director, Wael Hamza Julaidan, had 
been President of the Tucson Center in 1984-1985. He was a founding member of Al 
Qaeda and became Osama bin Laden's chief of logistics. Wadih al-Hage also spent 
time at the Tucson Center during the 1980s when it was raising money for the cause in 
Afghanistan. The Islamic Center of Tucson was the host for the IAP conferences and 
raised money for HLF. It was the first campus center to distribute the Islamist tracts and 
booklets prepared by Shaykh Abdullah Azzam, founder of MAK in Peshawar. 

On the East Coast the Al Kifah Refugee Services center in Brooklyn was the first 
charity in the USA whose primary purpose was to support Osama bin Laden and his 
Afghan-Arabs. Its beginnings can be traced to the arrival in Santa Clara, California, of 
two members of EIJ, AN Mohammed and Khaled Abd al-Dahab. Abd al-Dahab had left 
medical school and in 1984 was in Egypt on his way to Afghanistan when he met 
Mohammed, who persuaded him to accompany him to California. In the USA Abd 
al-Dahab worked quietly but efficiently collecting funds in mosques and dispatching 
money to terrorists throughout the Middle East. He maintained contact with Dr. Ayman 
al-Zawahiri, the leader of EIJ, and worked as a troubleshooter for that organization. He 
later moved to Brooklyn where in a tiny first-floor office in the Al Farouq Mosque he 
founded the Al Kifah Refugee Services center in 1987. Al Kifah relentlessly developed 
an international network with scores of centers around the world, including Tucson and 
thirty other cities in the USA. Although mostly small storefront operations, they still 
managed to raise millions of dollars to support the Afghan resistance, and the Al Kifah 
centers in New York and New Jersey regularly recruited American Muslims to fight in 
Afghanistan. By 1989 the Brooklyn center had become the meeting place for jihadists, 
and a year later Shaykh Abd al-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric and holy warrior, 
arrived and began planning terrorist attacks in the USA. [6091 Their first strike was in 
November 1990 when an Egyptian terrorist assassinated Meir Kahane, a radical rabbi, 
after his fiery speech in a New York hotel. The assassin later admitted that he and 
others, including Shaykh Abd al-Rahman, were planning to bomb tunnels and landmark 
buildings in New York City. The shaykh was eventually captured, tried, and sentenced to 
a long prison term. 

The Al Haramain Foundation-USA was founded in 1997, and its legal adviser and 
administrative director, Soliman al-Buthe (aka Suliman Albuthi), worked out of Ashland, 
Oregon. Perhaps it was the remote location, but it would be years before the Treasury 
Department discovered its direct link to Osama bin Laden and Chechen terrorists. Its 
assets were frozen in February 2004. In fact, the Al Haramain Foundation-USA proved 
to be a rather ineffectual organization. Ironically, after being shut down in February 
2004, its name continued to appear on the "website of the Friends of Charities 
Association (FOCA)," an organization founded and registered by the same Soliman 
al-Buthe in January 2004. [6 101 

American Muslims also gave alms to the Chechen-Ingush Society of the USA; 
Eritreans gave to the Al Ehsan charity of Washington DC; Algerians supported the 



Algerian Relief Foundation and Algerian Relief Fund; the Iraqis of Michigan gave to a 
host of Iraqi causes: Afghans gave to the Afghan Refugee Aid Committee and the 
Afghanistan Rescue Effort; Palestinians donated to a spectrum of Palestinian refugee 
organizations, including the Islamic-American Zakat Foundation of Bethesda, Maryland. 
Most of this money undoubtedly went to support the humanitarian objectives of these 
charities. In the end the FBI found no great conspiracy, no organization that centralized 
collection for each country or region. It was assumed that even though administrators of 
questionable charities knew one another, each worked in its own way. After all, there 
was always room for the individualist who for himself or his own favorite cause would 
skim off unaccountable funds. Adham Amin Hassound was such a "lone wolf." He had 
entered the USA on a student visa and then remained as an illegal resident. Arrested in 
South Florida in 2002 for recruiting jihadists, he had registered with the Florida branch 
of BIF in 1993; he then used BIF to collect funds for the Palestinian jihad, working as a 
freelance with no accountability to the foundation. [61 11 



Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development 

The Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development (HLF) was perhaps America's most 
perfectly disguised Islamic "charity." Founded in 1987 as the Occupied Land Fund, it 
was registered in Los Angeles under the IRS regulation [501(c)(3)] governing non-profit, 
tax-exempt charitable organizations. Founded by Palestinian immigrants, HLF was 
designed to help "victims of the Palestinian uprising." It opened its first office in Culver 
City, California, in January 1989 and soon became well known throughout the 
Palestinian community in southern California and the USA. In 1992 the Occupied Land 
Fund received its first substantial donation when Musa Abu Marzouk deposited 
$200,000 in the charity's bank account. The mysterious Marzouk, a native of Gaza, had 
been attending college in Louisiana when the Fund was launched. At the time he was 
already active in the founding of the United Association for Studies and Research 
(UASR), a "think tank" incorporated in Illinois in 1989 as a front for HAMAS. He may 
have attended the first important HAMAS fundraising in Kansas City in 1989 at which 
the radical Shaykh Yousuf al-Qaradawi from Qatar and the Chief Financial Adviser of 
Bahrain, Shaykh Ahmed al-Qattan, were present. In 1991 UASR moved to Springfield, 
Virginia, and Marzouk departed for Jordan as head of the HAMAS political bureau. [61 21 
According to one Occupied Land Fund official, Marzouk was just an average, 
unimpressive individual. "When he turned out to be a so-called chief of HAMAS political 
wing, I said, 'Poor HAMAS.' I had no clue, and I think the [US] government had no clue 
back in 1991, 1992." [6131 

In 1990 Marzouk opened a bank account in Virginia on behalf of the Islamic 
Association for Palestine (IAP) of Richardson, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, which was 
actively raising funds for HAMAS. He deposited $125,000 both that year and the 
next. [6 141 Although IAP would later deny any relationship with HAMAS, Marzouk had 
been a member of the IAP advisory boards and its Chairman in 1988-90. IAP had been 
founded as a pro-Palestinian organization in the early 1980s and in the years before 
HAMAS had operated from the Islamic Center of Tucson, Arizona. By the early 1990s, 
IAP was publishing a HAMAS communique asking for contributions "to be sent to the 
Occupied Land Fund in Los Angeles" and distributing paramilitary training videos. [6 151 
In 1993 Ghassan Elashi, lAP's Chairman, whose wife was a cousin of Marzouk, 



renamed the Occupied Land Fund the Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development, and 
moved from Los Angeles to Richardson, the headquarters of IAP. As a protective cover 
Elashi and HLF became founding members of the Texas chapter of the Council of 
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim lobbying agency in Washington DC. 
While Elashi and his four brothers preferred to remain quietly anonymous, Shukri Abu 
Bakar assumed the presidency of HLF to launch an aggressive fundraising campaign in 
support of the Palestinian Intifada. In a Ramadan appeal in March 1993 the pledge card 
declared: "Yes. I can and want to help needy families of Palestinian martyrs, prisoners 
and deportees "[6161 After the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 HLF began 
to attract attention. One of its directors Ahmed bin Yousef (aka Yousef SalalVi was a 
member of the HAMAS "inner circle" that served as the political command of HAMAS in 
the USA and reported directly to Musa Abu Marzouk. [617l In the wake of the bombing, 
when investigations curtailed his aggressive fundraising, he bitterly complained that 
"there is nothing that can be concealed in this world anymore" despite the best efforts of 
HAMAS, HLF, and IAP T6181 In August 2004 Marzouk's UASR was still under 
investigation because Ismael Elbarasse, "a high ranking HAMAS leader" with ties to 
UASR, used banks in the eastern USA to launder money, the "amounts ranging from 
tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars from various foreign sources including Saudi 
Arabia. " [61 91 

Shortly after HLF had moved to Texas Israeli authorities arrested two HAMAS leaders, 
both of whom held US citizenship During their interrogation, they provided critical 
information regarding the role that Musa Abu Marzouk had played in HAMAS. It was 
shared with the US Treasury Department, which then opened its own investigation of 
HLF. Treasury agents quickly learned that HLF regularly sponsored the entry into the 
USA of "religious workers," an amorphous immigration category that allowed the 
entrants to raise funds and be given a "green card" permitting legal employment. 
Officials at HLF admitted sending money to Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and 
Gaza, and it had on numerous occasions welcomed HAMAS fundraisers to the USA. 
However, they argued strenuously that the funds had been distributed on the basis of 
need, not ideology. The government did not press the matter, and the charity continued 
its activities and even expanded them. In October 1993, the three principal members of 
HLF, including President Shukri Abu Bakar and Ghassan Elashi along with several 
important members of IAP, met in a Philadelphia hotel with senior HAMAS leaders to 
discuss the means to increase funds for "Samah," a reversal of HAMAS and a 
codeword for the jihad in the Holy Land. The Philadelphia meeting was followed several 
months later by a strategy session in Mississippi during which HLF was designated as 
the primary fund raising HAMAS affiliate in the USA. 

Thereafter, HLF paid the expenses for innumerable visits to America by HAMAS 
delegations, one of which attended a conference organized by the Muslim Arab Youth 
Association (MAYA) in a Los Angeles hotel from 30 December 1994 to 2 January 1995 
during which the HLF Director for California, Mohammad al-Mezain, told the organizers 
that the Foundation collected funds "strictly for HAMAS terrorists." At the conference he 
received $207,000, a significant portion of the $1.8 million reportedly collected for 
HAMAS in 1995. Coincidentally, Shaykh Muhammad Siyam happened to be traveling 
throughout America in search of funds. Siyam was introduced as the head of the 
HAMAS military wing, and at one event exhorted the crowd: "Finish off the Israelis. Kill 
them all. Exterminate them. No peace ever." [6201 Despite even more provocative 
statements by Islamists associated with HLF and President Clinton's Executive Order of 



23 January 1995 designating HAMAS a terrorist organization, the FBI made no attempt 
to block HLF assets. In the same year Rita Katz, then a neophyte analyst investigating 
suspicious Islamic organizations, wrote that she could prove HLF was providing support 
to nine organizations that transferred funds to families of HAMAS terrorists . [6211 In 
response to President Clinton's Executive Order, however, Congress enacted 
anti-terrorist legislation that enabled the Justice and Treasury Departments to freeze 
terrorist assets; unperturbed, HLF blithely continued its fundraising. Attorney-General 
Janet Reno made no effort to intervene "even after a connection between the foundation 
and Osama bin Laden was revealed. " 16221 

At the IAP Convention in 1996 Abd al-Rahman Alamoudi, the Executive Director of the 
American Muslim Council, leader of the Islamic Institute, a supporter of both HAMAS 
and Hizbullah, and an Islamist who had "high level contacts with the Clinton White House 
in late 1995 and early 1996," acknowledged: "If we are outside this country we can say, 
'Oh, Allah destroy America.' But once we are here, our mission in this country is to 
change it." [6231 The actions of the HAMAS militants provoked Congresswoman Nita 
Lowey into demanding that the IRS revoke the tax-exempt status of HLF; she protested 
that there was ample "proof of the foundation's support for terrorism." Her accusations 
elicited no action, and HLF not only continued "business as usual," but rapidly 
expanded. It began to advertise itself as the largest Islamic charity in the USA, and 
opened offices in California, Illinois, and New Jersey now to collect funds for Chechnya 
and Kosovo as well as Palestine. 

While the FBI was loath to move against HLF, the Israelis were not. They raided the 
HLF office in Jerusalem in 1997 and found a cache of documents that contradicted the 
claims by the charity's US officials that funds were collected strictly for humanitarian 
purposes. The evidence clearly associated HLF with a satellite, the Islamic Relief 
Committee of Nazareth. Its Jerusalem Director, Rahman Anati, was arrested for 
distributing cash to family members of suicide bombers, and in May 1997 Israel closed 
HLF-Palestine, its satellite, and three other charities Despite the evidence, the FBI still 
refrained from action against HLF, but it continued its surveillance of the charity, begun 
in 1992. 16241 In reality those FBI agents who were building the case against HLF 
privately admitted that they were stonewalled by the Justice Department and the Clinton 
White House, both of whom "didn't want to come off as Muslim bashers. " [6251 
Congress, however, was more aggressive. It authorized the formation of a Commission 
on National Security/21 st Century. Chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren 
Rudman, the Commission held its first meeting in October 1998 and then in September 
1999 released its first report, warning that America was vulnerable to terrorism, and that 
terrorists were probably infiltrating the USA to destroy domestic targets. Surprisingly, 
there was no mention of the role that Islamic charities played in financing these Islamist 
movements. 

HLF continued its work unmolested. When IAP organized a conference at Brooklyn 
College in May 1998 entitled Palestine: 50 Years of Occupation, HLF joined with CAIR, 
the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Islamic Circle of North America to 
sponsor American Muslim speakers whose anti-Jewish rhetoric in Arabic was as 
intense as any found in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. The following year HLF 
hosted a conference entitled Rebuilding Shattered Lives, which featured representatives 
from WAMY, INTERPAL, and the Netherlands's Al Aqsa Foundation, a pro-Palestinian 
organization with headquarters in Yemen. In that same year the Attorney-General for 
the State of New York wrote to the IRS challenging the charitable status of HLF, as it 



was raising funds "not explicitly mentioned in the group's request to solicit funds in New 
York." Predictably, the IRS did nothing. It was no secret that the Clinton administration 
was seeking votes within the Muslim community, and also no secret that Vernon Jordan, 
friend and golfing partner to the President, was the attorney for HLF J6261 The IRS, 
however, was not alone. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) refused to 
deport immigrants affiliated with HLF and IAP. Perhaps it was too busy: in fiscal year 
2000 alone the Department of State approved "an astounding 493,473 temporary or 
non-immigrant US visas" for citizens from states already included on its own "watch 
list. " 16271 

Meanwhile HLF quietly continued to expand. It raised more than $5 million in 1998, $6 
million in 1 999, and $1 3 million in 2000. [6281 Finally, it took a lawsuit filed in the USA by 
the family of an American killed in Israel seeking damages from HAMAS to prod the US 
government into action. In August 2000 the State Department ordered its satellite, the 
Agency for International Development (AID), to withdraw its recognition of HLF for its 
ties with HAMAS and activities "contrary to the national defense and foreign policy 
interests of the United States." AID, reluctantly and with glacial speed, "started to review 
how it registers charities and relief groups that work overseas." [6291 ln the weeks after 
9/11 an investigation of suspected Islamic charities by the FBI resulted in a devastating 
report by its Director for Counterterrorism in November. A month later the assets of HLF 
were frozen and its offices promptly closed. 

Although the evidence collected left no doubt that HLF was the principal US charity 
supporting HAMAS, it was another year before arrests related to HLF funding practices 
were made. [6301 In December seven men were arrested in Texas and Lackawanna, 
New York, including four members of the Elashi family, and another seven in Dearborn, 
Michigan, for reportedly tunneling $50 million to Yemen in a money-laundering 
scheme [631l Musa Abu Marzouk, the senior HAMAS leader, was indicted in Texas for 
violating the ban on financial dealings with terrorists, and with what seemed excessive 
force, the North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI, Department of 
Commerce, IRS, INS, the Secret Service, the Customs Service, the State Department, 
and the police departments of Dallas, Addison, Piano, and Richardson, Texas, rounded 
up the Elashi family and permanently shut down HLF. [6321 Marzouk, his wife, the Elashi 
brothers, and InfoCom were charged with violating the 1979 International Emergency 
Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permitted the President to "investigate, regulate 
or prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange," the transfer of funds through banking 
institutions, and the export or import of currency and securities. [6331 After a decade of 
dithering, in July 2004 Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu Bakar, and three other officials of 
HLF were placed under arrest, and the government unsealed a forty-two-count 
indictment and prepared to prosecute. [6341 



Canadian connections 

Before 9/11 there was little difference between the operations of Islamic charities in 
Canada and the USA. In both countries they could be easily established, and once 
founded they received little oversight, if any. Canada was even more reluctant than the 
USA to enact legislation governing the distribution of charitable funds for international 
causes, and both were extremely lax concerning funds raised to be sent abroad 
Muslims, however, could establish refugee status in Canada much more easily than in 



the USA, and few security checks were ever made by Canadian officials. 

Human Concern International (HCI) of Canada was the first Islamic charity in North 
America to provide funds to Afghan-Arabs. Founded in 1979 in Calgary by Abudhamid 
Abdulrahim (aka Abu Obeida), it established a presence in Peshawar, providing 
scholarships for Afghan-Arabs to attend the University of Islamabad, a school favored 
by Shaykh Abdullah Azzam. A few years later HCI moved to Ottawa where in the 1980s 
it evolved into the most important Islamic charity in Canada. As a recognized 
international NGO, HCI received at least $250,000 in grants from the Canadian 
International Development Agency (CIDA) from 1988 to 1997. One critic later 
complained that HCI was "simultaneously receiving Canadian taxpayer funding and 
working with Al Qaeda." [635] In Peshawar the director of the HCI office was Ahmed 
Said Khadr (aka Abu al-Kanadi), the ranking member of EIJ and among the founders of 
Al Qaeda. Khadr had immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, and after the Soviet invasion 
of Afghanistan he had joined HCI and soon left for Peshawar. His presence there 
enabled HCI to convince the Canadian government to fund projects for Afghan 
refugees, funds that were then used to support Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad. Ahmed 
Khadr, who would be killed by Pakistani forces in October 2003, was in fact the leader 
of the most important jihadi family in Canada. Three of his four sons were Al Qaeda 
members: one was killed; one was badly injured; one was interned at Guantanamo Bay 
after 9/1 1 ; and one gave up the jihadist struggle. [636] 

In Peshawar Ahmed Khadr certainly consorted with Enaam Arnaout, a fellow founder 
of Al Qaeda. Arnaout, who later became director of BIF in Illinois, had opened an office 
in Ontario, Canada, in 1992 to raise money for Al Qaeda in Canadian mosques and 
through university student groups. Although each of these charities jealously guarded its 
independence, there appears to have been close cooperation between HCI and BIF 
until 1995. Then, the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad led Pakistani 
officials to HCI and the Khadrs who had financed the terrorist attack. Ahmed Khadr was 
arrested, but he was released after the intervention of the Canadian Prime Minister, 
Jean Chretien, who was presumably protecting a Canadian citizen. In 1996 Khadr 
returned to Canada where he and his wife created in Toronto a new charity, the Health 
and Education Project International. It was responsible for the construction of five 
clinics and two hospitals in Peshawar. The next year, 1997, CIDA finally stopped giving 
aid money to HCI, and in June 1998 the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) 
reported that HCI was one of several charitable organizations that used Canada's ethnic 
communities as a source of funding for terrorist groups that had established themselves 
in Canada "seeking safe haven, setting up operational bases, and attempting to gain 
access to the USA." Claude Pacquette, the police investigator who wrote the report, 
asserted that "loose immigration controls and interagency fumbling have turned Canada 
into 'a Club Med for terrorists. "' [6371 After the Khadrs had left Canada, never to return, 
the board of directors of HCI joined Health Partners International in a new charitable 
enterprise fully committed to humanitarian assistance. Ironically, the name of Ahmed 
Kadr later surfaced during the prosecution of Enaam Arnaout, but the investigators 
appeared to be ignorant of the close ties between Khadr and Arnaout, Osama bin 
Laden, and the founding of Al Qaeda. The amount of money the Khadrs may have used 
in support of Islamist movements has never been disclosed, but in 2003 when HCI 
reorganized with Health Partners International the charity had received at least $34 
million over its twenty-three years in existence. 

Canada, like the USA. was considered a haven for Islamist fundraisers. Not all were as 



active as the Khadrs, but in one interesting case a Sudanese citizen, Qutbi al-Mahdi, a 
University of Khartoum law school graduate and follower of Hasan al-Turabi, arrived in 
Canada in the 1980s as an employee of the IARA office in Montreal. An Islamist militant, 
he became a Canadian citizen, traveled on a Canadian passport, and "was a top figure 
of the North American branch of the Muslim Students Association." He worked at the 
Centre for Muslim Studies at McGill University in Montreal and on occasion played host 
to Turabi during his visits to Canada. [6381 After the 30 June 1989 coup d'etat and 
revolution in the Sudan he returned to become the hardline Sudanese Ambassador to 
Iran, and in November 1996 he was appointed Director of the External Security 
Organization. In 1998 the Canadian War Crimes Unit Director confirmed that his office 
was reviewing the case of Qutbi al-Mahdi. The investigation of HCI had raised his cause 
for concern that Canada was "being used as a base to raise money to support the war 
effort in Sudan. " [6391 In the same year CSIS learned that the Sudanese embassy staff 
in New York, London, and Rome collected cash for Osama bin Laden, established 
budgets to finance terrorism, and issued diplomatic passports that allowed Al Qaeda 
personnel to travel freely. The alleged agreement involved Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sudanese 
Islamists, and jihadists from Eritrea, Uganda, Yemen, and Egypt. [6401 

A more intensive scrutiny of Islamic charities in Canada was now begun by the 
authorities. The Canadian Customs and Revenue Agency revoked the charity status of 
the Canadian branch of MWL established in Etobicoke, Ontario, for not meeting "the 
filing requirements of the Income Tax Act." Nevertheless, it was not held responsible for 
terrorism. The Financial Intelligence Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 
(RCMP) would finally conclude in 2003 that "the main sources of funding of al-Qaeda 
are charities, NGO, and commercial enterprises . . . The money is given by supporters 
and is funneled to al-Qaeda through the hawala, the international underground banking 
system. " [6411 When the publication in 2003 of The Trouble with Islam by the Ugandan 
feminist Irshad Manji stoked the fires under the simmering debate in Canada about the 
nature of Islam, Canadian Muslims appeared quite capable of sorting out their own 
future. [6421 The President of the Canadian Islamic Congress argued persuasively that 
the Muslim congregation was determined to prove that "Canadian Muslims are, above 
all, Canadians. And Canadians are nice folks, with the best sense of decency in the 
world. " [6431 



WISE 

When Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti with a doctorate in engineering from an American 
university, was hired by the University of South Florida (USF) in January 1986, no one 
paid much attention. Yet this innocuous computer science professor was soon to 
become the very personification of terrorism's fellow-traveler. After the eruption of the 
Intifada in 1987 he became deeply involved in Palestinian causes, and thereafter 
sponsored numerous Palestinian students at USF. In 1988 he founded the Islamic 
Concern Project, an umbrella organization that included the Islamic Committee for 
Palestine (ICP), and subsequently, the World and Islamic Studies Enterprise (WISE), 
an Islamist "think tank" on the Florida campus. Al-Arian was helped by Dr. Bashir Nafi, 
an Egyptian biologist with a doctorate from the University of Cairo and a US resident. 
He arrived in Tampa in June 1991, after which he worked at WISE with Ramadan 
Abdullah Shallah, a fellow Egyptian and a founder of EIJ for whom Al-Arian had 



arranged a teaching position at USF; Shallah was also the Director of WISE and a 
member of the board of directors of ICP. In 1991 Nafi and Al-Arian used WISE to 
sponsor various conferences in which such Islamist luminaries as Shaykh Abd 
al-Rahman and Hasan al-Turabi were eager participants. 

WISE attracted little attention outside the Islamist world until 1994, when the production 
of Steven Emerson's television documentary Jihad in America described Al-Arian as the 
head of PIJ in North America. Thereafter, the activities of ICP, which included a large 
fundraising drive in south Florida, were under surveillance "until the FBI shut it down in 
1995" in the wake of White House criticism of fundraising in the USA for Palestinian 
radical qroups. f644] Al-Arian's office and home were searched, but he was charged 
with no crime. In the following year, however, his petition for citizenship was rejected 
when it was discovered that he had voted illegally in American elections; next, his 
brother-in-law was arrested as an illegal alien. Meanwhile, Shallah, whose hatred of the 
USA seemed limitless, left Florida following the death of PIJ leader Fathi Shiqaqi and 
surfaced in Damascus, where he became the new Secretary-General of PI J. [6451 

After 9/11 WISE and Sami al-Arian found themselves in yet more trouble, facing a 
fifty-count indictment in February 2002 including the use of an Islamic charity and an 
academic think tank to provide financial support for PIJ; the indictment held WISE 
responsible for the suicide bombings in Israel in which American citizens had been 
killed. Al-Arian was also accused of managing PIJ money and property. The radical 
Islamist mosques in the USA rallied behind al-Arian, collecting money for his defense, 
but he was discharged by USF in December 2002. His arrest and indictment led the FBI 
to his close friend Fawaz Damra, imam of the largest mosque in Ohio and a well-known 
Islamist. Damra, a Palestinian and veteran of the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, 
was arrested in 2004 and charged with lying about his ties to PIJ and ICP. He was then 
deported. Al-Arian remains in federal prison in Florida awaiting trial in 2005 for, among 
other crimes, "Conspiracy to Commit Racketeering, Conspiracy to Murder, Maim or 
Injure Persons at Places outside the United States," collecting funds for the "benefit of 
Specially Designated Terrorists" (i.e. PIJ and HAMAS), and facilitating the entry of 
terrorists into the USA by helping them to obtain entry visas. [6461 



SAAR Foundation 

Interest in the Suleiman Abd al-Aziz al-Rajhi (SAAR) Foundation at 555 Grove Street, 
Herndon, Virginia, a small city twenty miles south of Washington DC, began after a raid 
on the WISE offices in 1995 produced documents disclosing the close ties between 
SAAR and WISE. As early as 1993 funds were being sent from Virginia to Florida, and 
one message declared: "We consider you a part of us and an extension of us ... All 
your institutions are considered by us as ours . . . We make a commitment to you; we 
do it for you as a group, regardless of the party or facade you use the money for." [6471 
The SAAR Trust (later Foundation) had been founded in 1984 by a Palestinian, Yaqub 
Mirza, who had just received his doctorate in physics from the University of Texas. He 
had used money provided by Suleiman Abd al-Aziz al-Rajhi, the patriarch of the Al Rajhi 
Banking and Investment Corporation, to establish an organization that gave to charities, 
"invested in companies, and sponsored research, all with a goal of fostering the growth 
of Islam." Over the years the SAAR network had grown to include more than a hundred 
branches, including Muslim think tanks, charities, and companies. SAAR owned 



property in downtown Washington DC, and its officers lived in houses purchased in 
1987 by SAAR in Herndon. Many of its branches were linked by overlapping boards of 
directors, shared office space, and were involved in what was called by federal 
investigators the circular movement of money. 

It was not until 1998, however, that NSC pressed the FBI to intensify its investigation of 
SAAR, but the Bureau declined to become involved in what it perceived to be "ethnic 
profiling. "[648] Although the SAAR Foundation headquarters had been ordered closed 
in 2001 , it was not until March 2002 that 150 Treasury agents of Operation Green Quest 
raided the offices of SAAR Director Jamal Barzinji, the nearby Safa Trust, and the 
International Institute for Islamic Thought (HIT), all of which were suspected of 
laundering money for Al Qaeda, HAMAS, and other terrorist groups. Elsewhere, in Falls 
Church, the task force searched the combined office of MWL and IIRO, whose 
Palestine Charity Committee headed by Nadir al-Nuri had long been under suspicion of 
sending funds to HAMAS. [6491 Included among fourteen Islamic charities and 
businesses was HIT, a Muslim think tank, which was located across the street from the 
SAAR Foundation. Its Islamist founder, Ismail al-Faruqi, a Palestinian immigrant who 
taught for many years at Temple University in Philadelphia, had regularly predicted 
since 1983 that America would one day reject its Christian past and accept a great 
American Caliphate. 

The raid was the most important yet undertaken by government officials to expose the 
"money trail" of Islamic charities and Muslim commercial firms in the USA. It was, 
however, a decade overdue, for Rita Katz, a skillful and persevering investigator, had 
earlier and alone uncovered the "nameplate" SAAR operations at 555 Grove Street in 
Herndon. When Katz began checking the SAAR tax records, she discovered an 
accounting labyrinth that only an Ikhwan financier schooled in 1960s banking 
dispersions would understand. At Herndon SAAR, Safa Trust, and HIT accounts were 
intermingled. Charities that ostensibly lived off donations did not bother to proselytize. 
SAAR and Safa Trust had invested in Mar-Jac Investments, a poultry producer in 
Georgia which was also raided by Operation Green Quest agents. Although it had 
tangible assets, Mar-Jac also operated from a storefront at 555 Grove Street. So too did 
the Al Aqsa Foundation, a HAMAS front. By the time Katz was finished she had found 
130 interrelated organizations, from the African Muslim Agency to the York Foundation, 
that wove the bewildering SAAR spider-web. To complicate matters, outside 
organizations, such as WISE, received most of their funding from HIT, and the 
relationship between HIT and SAAR itself was hopelessly opaque. What the FBI did 
know, however, was that Tarik Hamdi, an HIT employee, had personally sent 
communications gear to Osama bin Laden. [6501 

What was SAAR? Tax records demonstrated a direct connection between the SAAR 
Foundation and five related organizations: HIT, Safa Trust, Sterling Management Group, 
Sterling Charitable Gift Fund, and Mar-Jac Investments. Money "was flowing freely in all 
directions," and much of it disappeared in accounts on the Isle of Man. [6511 In 1995 the 
government had listed SAAR-controlled charities in Virginia among eighty groups in the 
USA suspected of diverting cash to Islamist terrorists overseas. The SAAR Foundation, 
however, had managed to avoid any intense scrutiny because of the close links between 
the Saudi royal family and its patron, the Saudi banker Shaykh Suleiman Abd al-Aziz 
al-Rajhi. Saudi financiers such as al-Rajhi, Khaled bin Mahfouz, and Yassin al-Qadi 
were all major instruments in the expansion of Wahhabism, and their paths repeatedly 
lead back to Northern Virginia, where it was claimed they didn't "play for small 



stakes. " [6521 

The SAAR Director, Jamal Barzinji, was well known in Washington. He had first 
achieved prominence in the USA in 1980 when he began to represent WAMY, and he 
seemed especially close to Sami al-Arian and WISE. Barzinji was also director, officer, 
or chairman of a number of financial operations, including the Makkah Mukarramah 
Charity Trust, Inc., Mena Investments, Inc., and Reston Investments, Inc. He was listed 
with the Amana Mutual Funds Trust, a growth and income mutual fund headquartered in 
Bellingham, Washington, and appears to have become involved with the infamous 
Youssef Nada and his network by helping to set up Nada International in Liechtenstein. 
He was also a member of the board of directors of HIT, and the Graduate School of 
Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS), which received substantial support from the 
Saudi government: GSISS was the institution approved by the Department of Defense to 
certify Muslim chaplains in the US military. SAAR activities were not only well disguised, 
its directors were powerful and immensely wealthy Saudis, led by Suleiman Abd al-Aziz 
al-Rajhi and his brother Saleh Abd al-Aziz al-Rajhi, owner of a major construction and 
real-estate firm. 

Above all SAAR was particularly expert in the clandestine movement of money, 
including an inexplicable donation of $1.7 billion that SAAR had received in 1998, a 
donation reported in 2000 without any explanation "for this bit of accounting sorcery." 
SAAR disputed the sum, claiming an accounting error whereby three zeroes had been 
added to the account without reason. [6531 The SAAR Foundation was abruptly dissolved 
in December 2000 and was immediately replaced by the Sterling Charitable Gift Fund. 
No official reason was given for its closing, but Dr. Cherif Sedky, an American lawyer 
who lived in Jidda, represented Khaled bin Mahfouz, and had joined the SAAR 
Foundation board of directors in the mid-1990s, wryly mentioned that the SAAR 
Foundation had few board meetings. Loosely administered, SAAR had been the 
instrument through which more than $26 million had been sent overseas. It was a 
powerful organization with many powerful friends, and it was linked to the Safa Group 
whose Safa Trust funded many charities, both in the USA and throughout the world. The 
SAAR/Safa empire helped finance such institutions as the African Muslim Agency, 
Heritage Education Trust, HIT, the York Foundation, and then the Sterling Charitable Gift 
Fund. [654] Another SAAR official who attracted attention was Ahmad Totonji, an Iraqi - 
now Saudi - citizen and prominent Islamist. He helped found MSA in the USA and was 
its second President. He then became an SAAR official and Vice President of the Safa 
Group. The Operation Green Quest raid also resulted in the arrest of Soliman Biheiri, an 
Egyptian educated in Switzerland, resident of New Jersey, an Egyptian financier, and 
the banker for the Muslim Brotherhood in the USA. Biheiri had established Mostan 
International to raise money for HAMAS and Al Qaeda from such wealthy investors as 
Musa Abu Marzouk, Yassin al-Qadi, and Youssef Nada. [6551 

In 2003 a Virginia grand jury charged Soliman Biheiri with three counts of immigration 
violations. Although the charges appeared innocuous, Biheri was the central figure in a 
complex terrorism investigation spanning two decades He had founded BMI, an 
investment company based on Islamic principles, in January 1985. Advertising in 
popular Muslim magazines distributed throughout America, BMI offered financial 
services and a variety of real-estate investments in Maryland and Virginia. In 1985, 
Biheiri met and became close friends with Suliman al-Ali, who also lived in New Jersey. 
Four years later al-Ali left for Saudi Arabia, where he became a successful fundraiser 
for IIRO. Impressed, IIRO sent him back to the USA in 1991 to open an IIRO office 



around Washington DC. At the time the structure of Saudi relief was shifting from 
Afghanistan to the Balkans, and over the next few years al-Ali raised funds for Bosnia 
while investing in BMI. In August 1998, only days after the bombings of US embassies 
in East Africa, Biheiri received a call from Hassan Bahzfulla, secretary of the investment 
committee of IIRO, inquiring about BMI and Suliman al-Ali. Days later, Biheiri received 
a personal letter from the Secretary-General of MWL, a man he described as the "Pope 
of the Muslims," ordering him to cancel "all [IIRO] accounts with your firm." Shortly 
afterwards, an FBI investigation discovered that BMI was involved in funneling money to 
HAMAS. Eventually, Biheiri was subpoenaed, by which time the FBI had learned that 
among his silent investors were Musa Abu Marzouk and Yassin al-Qadi. The BMI probe 
continued into 2004 as federal investigators explored the links between Biheiri, Mercy 
International, IIRO, MWL, and the East African bombings. 16561 Soliman Biheiri was 
finally charged in 2003, not for laundering money, but for immigration fraud. [6571 

As the investigations by Operation Green Quest continued it was impossible to 
separate the Safa Group from SAAR, now the Sterling Charitable Gift Fund, for Barzinji 
was the director of various Safa Group enterprises and charities including the Child 
Development Foundation of Herndon, the Sana-Bell Al Kheer, Inc., the Fiqh Council of 
North America, Inc., and the Heritage Education Trust, Inc. Moreover, Safa received 
revenue in rent from MWL and IIRO, whose headquarters were also in Herndon and 
Leesburg, Virginia. [6581 The Falls Church office of MWL was searched by the FBI in 
2002, with no charges being filed. The office, however, was placed under scrutiny, and 
raided again in July 2005. The employee who was working as Publicity Director, but 
was actually Director of the charity's operations, was arrested and charged with 
immigration fraud. Although some fifty Islamic enterprises were raided, closed down, or 
had their assets frozen by federal authorities because of suspected ties to terrorists, no 
one could be quite sure that Operation Green Quest had "inflicted serious injury on the 
Wahhabi lobby, the Saudi-backed extremist network that largely controls Islam in 
America," but it did uncover the magnitude of monies being passed through SAAR 
enterprises. [6591 There was the $100,000 donation from Pathfinder Investments, a 
Netherlands Antilles company controlled by the Mahfouz family, to the Success 
Foundation, a Virginia charity. SAAR had also moved another $20 million to Bank Al 
Taqwa and Akida Bank Private Ltd., controlled by Youssef Nada and Ahmed Idris 
Nasreddin. There was the unexplained $9 million transfer of funds from the Humana 
Charitable Trust, an Isle of Man front, to SAAR; also on the Isle of Man a private, 
unregistered trust, Happy Hearts, received substantial sums from SAAR. The 
Washington Post reported that in the mid-1990s "the Saudi government, upset with its 
inability to control the SAAR network, pressed contributors to stop giving money." If that 
were true, it has never been proven. [6601 



Epilogue 

The Department of State had been the first agency of any government to name 
terrorist organizations, list them as such, and proscribe the delivery of funds to them or 
their charities. In 1995, the Treasury Department initiated investigations into the shady 
dealings between a number of Saudi US charities and suspected extremist groups. 
Inexplicably, the investigation was summarily closed by the Clinton administration. Had 
this and similar investigations been allowed to proceed US security agencies may well 



have unraveled the terrorists' networks and the charitable sources of their funding 
before the tragedy of 9/11 that signaled the end of Saudi spending in support of 
Wahhabi Islamist movements throughout the world. The Saudis had good reason to be 
furious with Bin Laden for his attack on America, for 9/11 revealed the hidden elements 
of Saudi policy in the USA, and that most of the suicide bombers were Saudis. On 15 
August 2002, relatives of those killed in 9/11 filed a lawsuit in the US District Court in 
Washington, a 258-page complaint accusing international banks, eight Islamic 
foundations and charities, the government of Sudan, and a multitude of individuals of 
helping finance Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and demanding $100 trillion in 
damages. [6611 There was little likelihood that the plaintiffs would succeed, but that was 
not the issue. One plaintiff probably spoke for all: "It's not the money. We want to do 
something to get at these people. " [6621 

During the past three decades the Saudis had created numerous enterprises, 
institutions, and charities whose resources and members were the agents for the spread 
of Salafist, Islamist Wahhabism throughout the world. MWL, WAMY, and the Al 
Haramain Foundation were all under the control of and financed by the government of 
Saudi Arabia As the oil spigots opened, the petrodollars flowed to hundreds of other 
Saudi Islamic organizations, large and small, but Riyadh paid special attention to those 
propagating Wahhabism among western societies. Over these three decades Saudi 
funds were used to build and administer over 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, and 
dozens of academies and schools in non-Muslim, mostly western, countries. Official 
Saudi sources have reported that between 1975 and 1987 Saudi "overseas development 
aid" averaged $4 billion per year, and that level was maintained, if not increased, during 
the next decade. Some of that aid certainly went to international development projects, 
but at least half, $50 billion in twenty-five years, and perhaps as much as two-thirds, 
was used to finance strictly "Islamic activities." "Compared to these numbers, the 
massive Soviet external-propaganda budget (estimated at $1 billion annually) at the peak 
of Moscow's power looks modest indeed. " [6631 

Today, Salafist Islamist ideologies have gained a significant following among American 
Muslims, largely through the efforts of Saudi-supported charities that should be 
discouraged if not suppressed, for Islamist extremism is not a matter of religion but of 
criminal sedition. The Islamists should not be tolerated any more than were the Nazis. 
The instinctive response is to employ all the agencies of law enforcement to crush 
seditious organizations, but force is not always the most effective instrument in 
combating ideologies. Radical Islam is best dealt with by ideological and political means, 
and the Islamists are very vulnerable on two issues that the western world should exploit: 
the ideology of jihad and the nature of Wahhabi subversion not only in the West but in 
the Islamic world as well. The ideology of jihad, which is the psycho-religious engine 
driving Islamist terrorism, is not representative of Islam practiced by the vast majority of 
Muslims, who reject it. Today in the USA many of the important organizations claiming 
to represent American Muslims are financed and controlled by Wahhabis who have 
attempted to silence those who speak for mainstream Islam. The long alliance between 
the USA and Saudi Arabia has contributed in no small measure to the credibility of that 
condition and, by implication, the reach of its ideology, yet to end that close relationship 
with Riyadh would hardly solve the problem. Rather, the USA must take the lead in 
forging a Muslim alliance against extremism and provide the resources to sustain it. In 
the Islamic world today there is a growing backlash against the Islamist extremists that 
the USA should strongly support. [6641 



Islamist extremism has not yet become the dominant force in Islam, but there is no 
doubt that in the 1980s Saudi money brought Wahhabi Islam to the small and 
impoverished Muslim community in the USA and provided it with the resources to build 
an infrastructure by which Wahhabism could be spread and Islamist ideology could be 
expressed without challenge. Some 80 percent of all mosques and Islamic institutions 
and schools established in the USA and Canada appear to have received support from 
Saudi sources, principally charities. The mosques became centers of radical Islam, and 
the Muslim schools became nurseries for intolerance, both supported by Saudi 
charities. Since 9/11 the US government has used its security agencies and legal 
authority to halt the use of mosques, charities, and Islamist institutions as a conduit for 
Muslim youth to join jihad organizations active in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and the 
Philippines. The FBI and other intelligence agencies have immobilized internet sites that 
promote violence, recruit jihadists, or use charitable fronts to raise money. Undoubtedly, 
the most important and decisive goal is for the administration, Congress, and their 
friends in the Muslim community to isolate the prominent radical and Islamist 
organizations and thus de-politicize Islam. There can be no greater force to marginalize 
the Islamists than the rational Muslim organizations of mainstream Islam, which should 
receive unwavering support from America, predominantly a Christian nation. American 
Muslims and their organizations should, therefore, embark upon a new strategy as soon 
as possible. While the Muslim community has legitimate religious concerns related to 
the institution of charitable giving, the Islamic community must understand the necessity, 
given the social, political, and religious cultures of the USA, for greater transparency in 
their charitable institutions to satisfy the Islamic community, the federal government, and 
the American public. 

Daniel Pipes has written that Islamism is not so much a distortion of Islam as a 
radically new interpretation. The painful fact is that Muslims alone are susceptible to the 
lure of Islamist extremism. While safeguarding the civil rights and religious freedoms of 
Muslims, steps must be taken to diminish their unique susceptibility to this totalitarian 
ideology. [6651 In order to protect the rights of Muslim charities, banks, and other 
institutions, and the rights of Muslims devoted to Islam and the precept of zakat in 
America, perhaps the only way is to employ a Cold War practice: "Trust, but verify." 



Chapter 12 Conclusion 



The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, 
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it. 

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, st. 72 



At the beginning of this illusive and intricate saga a very clear distinction was made 
between those Islamic charities - some several score - which supported jihad to 
achieve the Islamist state and the many thousands devoted to humanitarian and religious 
purposes throughout both the Islamic and non-Muslim worlds. Although few in number, 
those charities with an Islamist agenda were not only the largest but the wealthiest 
Islamic charities, which enabled them, through the disbursement of a great deal of 
money, to support the religious commitment and objectives of the small Islamist minority 
among the world's Muslims by jihad, including the use of terror. This very complex tale 
of intense religious belief to justify the wanton disregard for human life and the manner 
by which it was carried out has been the subject of this book. 

It begins after 1973 with the acquisition of an enormous amount of wealth by the 
members of OPEC, particularly Saudi Arabia, in return for petroleum to quench the 
insatiable thirst of the West, particularly the United States, for oil. The primitive financial 
institutions in Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world at that time were slow to respond to the 
management of such large sums of revenue. They had neither the trained staff nor 
experience in banking, and the Islamic restriction against interest on borrowed money, 
the very foundation of western banking, spawned new and fragile systems of fiscal 
management by Islamic banks to complement the traditional institution of hawala to 
transfer large sums with little accountability. Consequently, wealthy donors were 
increasingly inclined to satisfy their zakat obligation and to distribute their excess wealth 
as an act of religious piety (sadaqa and waqf) through donations to the traditional 
institution of the Islamic charity. This abundance of charitable giving produced, in the 
late 1980s and early 1990s, an astonishing proliferation of new charities established by 
wealthy Saudis, which had, however, a more specific agenda - to promote the Wahhabi 
Islam of Saudi Arabia - unlike the older, less ideological charities, which promoted 
Islam by humanitarian relief and the construction of mosques and schools, but not jihad. 

The invasion of Muslim Afghanistan by the kafirin communists of the Soviet Union was 
greeted with outrage throughout the Muslim world, and sparked a determination to 
defend Islam, providing an opportunity for the new Islamic charities to use their wealth 
to fund jihad in Afghanistan, where its distribution was increasingly managed by 
Islamists to promote their ideological objectives by any means, cloaked in the mantle of 
Wahhabism. When the disintegrating Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, 
the Islamist leadership was determined not to remain solely in that country, which had 
plunged into civil war, but to seek their objectives throughout the world by utilizing the 
veteran Afghan-Arab mujahideen ready to die for the Islamist faith by jihad. From 



Afghanistan - or, more precisely, Peshawar - the mujahideen under numerous leaders 
scattered in cells throughout the globe, for they could hardly return to their homelands, 
whose secular governments would have instantly incarcerated or killed them. 

At first they found a safe haven in the Sudan, whose revolutionary Islamist government 
had come to power in 1989, the year that the Afghan war ended. Here they were 
welcomed, and accommodated in a score of jihadist training camps scattered in the 
semi-arid desert surrounding Khartoum, financed by a spate of new - mainly Saudi - 
charities, which had suddenly appeared in the capital. These Afghan-Arab mujahideen 
could not resist the call for military assistance by the beleaguered Bosniaks in the 
Balkans. Other Islamist jihadists, with support from Islamic charities, went to assist the 
Muslims of Central Asia, Transcaucasia, and Chechnya, while a separate group had 
returned directly from Peshawar to the Philippines and elsewhere throughout Southeast 
Asia. While the use of jihad in the Holy Land may have had intellectual roots similar to 
those of the Salafist Islamists, its primary aim, expressed by the Intifada and suicide 
bombers and supported by Saudi charitable giving, was to destroy Israel, and only then 
to establish the Islamist state in Palestine. Finally, jihad by the use of terror and funded 
by Islamic charities arrived in Europe, its Islamist proponents submerged within the 
great wave of Muslim immigration, and took the form of terrorist attacks in Amsterdam, 
Madrid, and London; but the greatest confrontation between jihadist Islamist terrorists 
and the West had already succeeded in the destruction, with great loss of life, of the 
World Trade Center in New York on 9/1 1 . 

It was this act that galvanized the United States to mobilize the resources, not only of 
its allies, but, slowly and painfully, those of other Muslim countries, against terrorism; 
and President Bush has declared that "money is the lifeblood of terrorism." One reporter 
claims that '"Financial Jihad' (Al Jihad bil-Mal) has funded more than 26,000 terror 
attacks, including 144 suicide attacks. " [6661 Whether this is an exaggeration is, of 
course, not the point; the point is that jihadist Islamist terrorism remains very much a 
reality, and a danger to innocent civilians in Muslim as well as non-Muslim countries. 
Consequently, scores of national and international agencies have been created to 
interdict and disrupt the flow of financial resources required to sustain terrorism, with 
mixed results. The United States has been the most aggressive in this pursuit of the 
financial sources of terrorism and has curtailed or closed the activities in America of the 
large and wealthy MWL, IIRO, the Rabita Trust, and especially the Islamic Society of 
North America, with surprisingly little reaction from the Saudi government and relative 
silence about attacks in the US media on Saudi "missionaries" disseminating egregious 
Wahhabist propaganda in American mosques. 

After two decades, funding for the Islamist movement by specific Islamic charities 
appears to be in sharp decline. Certainly, the vast financial networks that have been 
erected throughout the world to combat terrorism are responsible for the constricted flow 
of money laundered through Islamic charities; but the Islamists have had considerable 
experience and skill in acquiring and moving money, and no sooner has one network 
been disabled than another usually appears, in a different form and using different 
methods. The efforts to impede the flow of charitable funds to Islamist jihadists has also 
been greatly facilitated by "103 charities suspected of raising funds for terror [that] have 
been shut or otherwise neutralized in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and 
Kuwait alone. " [6671 In October 2005 Saudi Arabia announced that King Abdullah, 
Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, had called for an Extraordinary Islamic Summit to 
be held in Mecca in December 2005 under the aegis of the OIC. Among the issues for 



the fifty-seven Muslim nations to consider was the creation of a poverty fund as one 
significant step in response to the difficulties encountered in achieving greater 
transparency regarding the purposes for which the billions of dollars of charitable 
donations are used throughout the Muslim world. Never known for taking strong stands 
on unpleasant subjects, the OIC would now have the mandate to distinguish between the 
many thousands of humanitarian and good works performed by Islamic charities and 
those that would be considered criminal. Whether the OIC will pass such a resolution 
and then enforce it remains to be seen. "In faith and hope the world will disagree, but all 
mankind's concern is charitv." f6681 



Notes 



Endnotes 



Introduction 



[1] Ayman Al-Zawahiri, "Loyalty and Enmity, an Inherited Doctrine and a Lost Reality," 
FBIS report, Washington DC, February 2003, p. 21. 



[2] See the annual reports, Patterns of Global Terrorism, US Department of State, 
Washington DC, and its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations Designations compiled 
every two years since 1997 



[3] In 1997 the Muslim Students' Association of the United States (MSA) listed 
forty-three Muslim agencies located in the USA for soliciting donations for charities 
operating overseas: see www.msa-natl.org/resources/Relief Orqs.html . 



[4] M. E. Hamdi, The Making of an Islamic Political Leader. Boulder, CO: Westview 
Press, 1998, pp. 108-110. 



[5] See Mansour al-Nuqaydan, "The Islamist Map in Saudi Arabia and the Question of 
Repudiation, "Al Wasat, Manama, 28 February 2003, FBIS translation from the Arabic 
GMP2003022800126, Washington DC, 28 February 2003. 



[6) See Quran, Sura 62; Mahmoud Haddad, "Salafiyya Movement," in Philip Mattar 



(ed.), Encyclopedia of Modern Middle East and North Africa, Farmington Hills, Ml: 
Thomson Gale, 2004, vol. II, pp. 1973-1975: T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, London: 
W H. Allen, 1885, pp 548-549; "Indonesian Background: Why Salafism and Terrorism 
Don't Mix," International Crisis Group, Asia Report, No. 83, Brussels, 13 September 
2004; for a history of Salaf and pertinent definitions see www. salaf notkhalaf . com . 



[7] As to the definition of terrorism and the definition used by the US Federal 
Emergency Management Association, see www.mema.domestic- 
prepardness.net/qlossarv.html . 



[8] "Bin Laden's Money Takes Hidden Paths to Agents of Terror,'Was/?/ngfon Post, 21 
September 2001 , p. A13. 



[9] "New Treasury Unit to Track Terrorist Funding Methods," US Department of the 
Treasury report, 14 September 2001, available at 

www.usconsulate.orq.hk/usinfo/terror/2001/091401.htm . 



[10] Kenneth W. Dam, "The Financial Front of the War on Terrorism - the Next Phase," 
address delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, 8 June 2002. 



[11] See Matthew Levitt, "Charitable and Humanitarian Organizations in the Network of 
International Terrorist Financing," testimony before the Subcommittee on International 
Trade and Finance, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, United States 
Senate, 1 August 2002. 



1 The third pillar of Islam: zakat 



[12) A. Rahman, Subject Index of Quran. Lahore: Islamic Publications (PVT) Limited, 
1988. 



[13) Abu Bakr quoted in Shaykh Musa Abdulmajeed et al, "Declaration of Jihad against 
African Sudanese, "fahva issued from Kordofan, El Obeid, 27 April 1993. 



[14] From Sayyid Abu al-'Ala Maududi, "Islam: Its Meaning and Message," in M. Tariq 
Quraishi (ed.), Islam: an Introduction, Indianapolis: American Trust Publications, 1988: 
see also "Application of Islamic System of Zakat," islamzine.com/pillars/Zakat.html . 



[15] Faisal Raja, "The Significance of Zakat," Khilafah Magazine, December 2001, 
www khilafah.com. 



[16] Tajuddin B. Shu'aib, The Essentials of Ramadan, the Fasting Month, Los Angeles: 
Da'awah Enterprises International, Inc., 1991; see also Talut Mujahid, "42 Ways of 
Supporting Jihad. " www.homescuritvus.net . 



[17] Khilafah Rashidah, "The Significance of Zakat," uploaded on 10 December 2001 at 
khilafah.com . R sabeelillah, "In the Way of Allah," is a general term meaning all good 
causes that has become today more specifically defined to mean "those who fight in the 
cause of Allah against the enemies of Islam." See Abduallah Tariq, "Our 
Dialogue, "Islamic Voice, vols. 13-14, no. 156, December 1999. 



[18] Janine A. Clark, Islam, Charity, and Activism: Class Networks and Social Welfare in 
Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 



[19] "Second Opinion, "Daily Times, Pakistan, 1 October 2004. See also Michael 
Bonner, Mine Ener, and Amy Singer (eds.), Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern 
Contexts, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 



[20] For instance, see "Use Zakah for Investment, Employment, Cottage Industries," 
from the Fifth International Conference on Zakah held in Kuwait, in Islamic Voice, India, 
December 1998. 



[21] "Conference Calls for Including Zakat (Alms) in Law, Regional 
Politics, " www.ArabicNews.com 11/2/1998: "Use Zakah for Investment." 



[22] Mohammad Akhtar Saeed Siddiqi, Early Development of Zakat Law and Ijtihad: A 
Study of the Evolution of Ijtihad in the Development of the Zakat: Law during 1st 
CenturyAH, Karachi: Islamic Research Academy, 1983; Monzer Khaf, "The 
Performance of the Institution of Zakah in Theory and Practice," International 
Conference on Islamic Economics, Kuala Lumpur, 26-30 April 1999. 



[23] Nimrod Raphaeli, "Commentaries on Islamic Economic Discipline and Islamic 
Banking "Middle East Economic News Report, no. 19, 10 (August 1987). 



[24] Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Mosque and State, "Wall Street Journal, 10 August 1987. 



[25] Abd al-Muem al-Gusi, "Contemporary Governmental Application of Zakat in 
Sudan," Seminar on Contemporary Applications of Islamic Economics, Casablanca, 



Morocco, 5-8 May 1998; Muhammad Bashir Abdulqadir, Nizam al-Zakah fi al-Sudan, 
Omdurman: Omdurman Islamic University Printing and Publishing, Sudan, 1992, p. 192. 



[26) Holger Weiss, Obligatory Almsgiving: An Inquiry into Zakat in the Pre-Colonial Bilad 
al-Sudan, Helsinki: Helsinki Oriental Society, 2003, p. 26 



[27] "Awkaf: Seeing it from the Socio-Economic Perspective. " OICexchange.com at 
www.oicexchanqe.com , 18 March 2004. 



[28] Research Center for Islamic History, Arts and Culture (IRCICA), 
www.islamic-world.net/economic/waqf/waqaf mainpaqe.html . p. L. 



[29] S. Balman, "Saudis, US Fail to Limit Extremist Funding," UPI, Washington DC, 18 
August 1997. 



[30] MEMRI Special Dispatch No 360: www memri.org . 



[31] Interview with Al Sharq Al Awsat, a Saudi-owned London daily and reported in Ayn 
Al Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 20 September 2002. 



[32] "WASHINGTON, Insider Notes," UPI, 2 January 2004; see Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 
Yusuf, Fiqh al Zakah (English translation by Dr. Monzer Khaf), Center for Research in 
Islamic Economics, Jeddah, 2000. 



[33] M. Isikoff and M. Hosenball, "Jihad's Long Reach, "Newsweek, 18 September 2003. 



2 Saudi Arabia and its Islamic charities 



[34] "Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz: Rejects Charges against Saudi Charitable 
Societies, "Ayn Al Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 8 November 2002. 



[35] "Knights under the Prophet's Banner.'Worfd News Connection, 29 October 2003, 
translated from an article published in Sawt al-Jihad that first appeared in Al Sharq Al 
Awsat, London, October 2003. 



[36] Ayn Al Yaqeen, at www.ain-al-vakeen.com , and report at www.memri-orq/ . MEMRI 
Special Dispatch No. 360. 



[37] Anthony Cordesman, "Saudi Arabia: Opposition, Islamic Extremism, and 
Terrorism. " www.csis.org , also in SUSRISNewsletter, www.saudi-us-relations.org . 



[38] "Reflections from a Saudi Prince, "Business Week Online, 9 November 2001 . 



[39] "Saudi Arabia Announces Counter-Terrorism Measures: Official Statements and 
Press Briefings," press release, Embassy of Saudi Arabia Information Office, 3 
December 2002. 



[40) Saudi Red Crescent Society website ( www.srcs.orq.sa ) and news releases, 
al-Dhabab Road, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 



[41] "Government Evidentiary Proffer Supporting the Admissibility of Co-Conspirator 
Statements, "United States of America v. Enaam M. Arnaout, US District Court, Northern 
District of Illinois, Eastern Division, Case No. 02 CR 892, 6 January 2003. 



[42] "The Making of a Terrorist," The Straits Times, 23 September 2001 . 



[43] Abdullah Azzam interview. See "Testimony of Steven Emerson with Jonathan 
Levin," US Senate Committee of Governmental Affairs, 31 July 2003, pp. 1 1-13. 



[44] "Family, Friends Tell of the Man behind bin Laden, "USA Today, 12 October 2001: 
"Bin Laden Underling Raised Money in US," UPI, 11 October 2001; "Testimony of 
Steven Emerson""Usama Bin Laden - a Millionaire Finances Extremism in Egypt and 
Saudi Arabia/'A/RoseA/ Yusuf, Egypt, 17 May 1993. 



[45] "Government Evidentiary Proffer." 



[46] "Khattab's Brother Interviewed on Khattab's Life, Death in Chechnya, "Al Sharq Al 
Awsat, Saudi Arabia, 2 May 2002. 



[47] "Pakistan Deporting 89 Arab Aid Workers," AP, 6 October 2001 



[48) The New York Times Report, 26 September 2003, quoted in Josh Lefkowitz and 
Jonathan Levin, "Kingdom Cover," www.nationalreview.com . 11 February 2004. 



[49] "Usama Bin Laden - a Millionaire Finances Extremism" see also Muhammad Basil, 
Al-Ansaru Arab fi Afghanistan, pamphlet published by the Committee for Islamic 
Benevolence Publications, 1991, p. 26. 



[50] New York Times, 26 September 2003; "Charity and Terror/'A/eivswee/t, 9 
December 2002 



[51] "Testimony of Steven Emerson," pp. 23-24. 



[52] Andrew Higgins and Christopher Cooper, "CIA-Backed Team Used Brutal Means 
to Break up Terrorist Cell in Albania, "Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2001 . 



[53] Compass Newswire, Copenhagen, 27 June 1995 



[54] Dore Gold, "Saudi Arabia's Dubious Denials of Involvement in International 
Terrorism," Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Position Paper No. 504, 1 October 



2003. 



[55] Cordesman, "Saudi Arabia." 



[56] "The Saudi Connection, "USNews & World Report, 15 December 2002 



[57] N. P. Walsh, "Al-Qaida Men Handed to US, Says Georgia, "Guardian, 23 October 
2002. 



[58] Article 7, AynAI Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 1 November 2002 



[59] "In Brief, "AynAI Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 12 September 2003. 



[60] R. Kuppchinsky, "Spotlight: The Moscow Metro Bombing, "RFE/RLAnalytical 
Reports, vol. 4, no. 8, 12 March 2004; "Chechnya News," Maktab al-Jihad, 
www.maktab-al-iihad.com , 10 February 2004. 



[61] Monthly Digest, Society for Humanitarian Research, 30 August 2000. 



[62] Alex Alexiev, "Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States," Center 
for Security Policy postion paper, US Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology 
and Homeland Security, 26 June 2003. 



[63] Treasury News, Office of Public Affairs, 11 March 2002, PO-1087. 



[64) "Lawyers Seek to Freeze Saudi Assets in US, " MENAFN.COM Middle East North 
Africa - Financial Network, www.arabnews.com . 30 August 2002; 'Al-Haramain Charity 
is Suspected of Aiding al-Qaeda's Network. " www. middle-east-online. com . 23 January 
2004. 



[66] "Al-Haramian Shuts 3 Offices Abroad; 4 More to Close, " ArabNews.com . 16 May 
2003; "Saudis Admit Funding Hamas, " WorldTribune.com . Washington DC, 13 June 
2003; Gold, "Saudi Arabia's Dubious Denials." 



[66) "Al Haramain Islamic Foundation Welcomes Retraction; Washington Times 
Apologizes for Inaccuracy," PR Newswire (New York), 26 November 2003; "IRS 
Officials Execute Search Warrant against Al Haramain Foundation," press release, 
United States Embassy, Tokyo, Japan, 19 February 2004; United States of America v. 
Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, US District Court of the District of Oregon, February 
2005. 



[67] "The First Forum for Charitable Societies Ends its Session, "Ayn Al Yaqeen, Saudi 
Arabia, 8 November 2002; "Prince Salman Ibn Abdul Aziz: Rejects Charges." 



[68] "Youth's Drug Problems Discussed, "Monthly Digest of Society for Humanitarian 
Research, 30 August 2000. 



[69] Stewart Bell, "US Links Toronto Group to Bin Laden, "National Post, Canada, 19 
September 2003. 



[70] Greg Palast and D. Pallister. "Crimes against Civilization, "Guardian. 7 November 
2001. 



[71] "WAMY Keen to Boost its Activities Despite Smear Campaign: Wahhabi,"A/ 
Jazeera, www.aliazeerah.info , 27 August 2002. 



[72] "WAMY to Offer Ramadan Iftar (Breaking of the Fast) Meals for Impoverished 
Muslims in 40 Countries," Saudi Arabia Ministry of Culture and Information website, 
www.saudinf.com, 26 October 2003. 



[73] "Al-Anzy, the First Arab POW Returns from Afghanistan," lslamOnline.net, Kuwait, 
9 February 2002. 



[74] Laurie Cohen, G. Simpson, M. Maremont, and P. Fritsch, "Bush's Financial War 
on Terrorism Includes Strikes at Islamic Charities, "Wall Street Journal, 25 September 
2001; J. Mintz, "From Veil of Secrecy, Portraits of US Prisoners Emerge, "Washington 
Post, 15 March 2002, p. A3. 



[75] "Terrorism Weighs on US-Saudi Relations, "Washington Times, 26 November 
2002; Steve Emerson, "Fund-Raising Methods and Procedures for International 
Terrorist Organizations," House Committee on Financial Services, Subcommittee on 



Oversight and Investigations, 12 February 2002. 



[76] M. Boettcher, "Evidence Suggests al-Qaeda Pursuit of Biological, Chemical 
Weapons, " CNN. com World. 14 November 2001 . 



[77] E. J. Lake, "US Demands Data on Islamic Charities," UPI, 22 March 2002 



[78) See www.treasurv.gov/terrorism.html for Wafa listing. 



[79] Mintz, "From Veil of Secrecy." 



[80] "Benevolence International Foundation, " www. rotten. com. librarv/history/terrorist- 
organizations/b-i-f/ . 



[81] "Benevolence International. " www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolence-lnternational- 
Foundation. 



[82] C. Freeze, "Islamic Charity May See Assets Frozen, "Globe and Mail, Toronto, 1 
October 2001: T. Hays, "Feds Link Money Smuggler to Outlawed Muslim 
Charity, "Sacramento Bee via AP, 27 November 2003. 



[83] J. Miller, "US is Said to See Links between Terrorism and Islamic Charities, "New 



York Times, 19 February 2000 



[84] "Saudi Arabia Announces Counter-Terrorism Measures." 



[85] Lefkowitz and Levin, "Kingdom Cover." 



[86] "In the Wake of the Riyadh Bombings," MEMRI Special Dispatch Series - No. 
514, 1 June 2003, Al Sharq Al Awsat, London, 17 May 2003. 



[87] "Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Implements New Regulations Regarding 
Charities, "Saudi Arabia News, Saudi-US Relations Information Service, 
www.saudi-us-relations.org , 21 July 2003. 



[88] "Threatened Humanitarian and Charity Societies Prepares [sic] for First 
Conference. " www.ArabicNews.com . 4 January 2003. 



3 The banks 



[89] United States of America v. Enaam M. Arnaout, various documents, including 
Government's Evidentiary Proffer, Case No. 02 CR 892, US District Court, Northern 
District of Illinois, Eastern Division, 6 January 2003. 



[90] "Les documents originaux de la Golden Chain. " www.investigateur.com . 



[91] A. Fuer, "Bin-Laden Group had Extensive Network of Companies, Witness 
Says,"A/eiv York Times, 13 February 2001 . 



[92) Ottawa Citizen, 12 October 2001, noted in Frontline Fellowship, 

www.frontline.ora.za/articles/terrorism persecution.htm . 



[93] R. Woodward. "Bin Laden Said to 'Own' the Taliban, "Washington Post. 11 October 
2001. 



[94] D. Benjamin and S. Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror. New York: Random House, 
2002, pp. 292-293. 



[95] J. Winer and T. J. Roule, "Fighting Terrorist Finance, "Survival, vol 44, no. 3, 
Autumn 2002, p. 99. 



[96] See the reports of OFAC on www.treas.Qov/offices/enforcement/ofac/ . 



[97] See www.fbi.qov/conaress/conqress02/lormel021202.htm 



[98] "Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Cracks Down on Terrorist Financing," US 
Consulate, Hong Kong: www.usconsulate.orq.hk/usinfo/terror/2001/103101.htm , 31 



October 2001 



[99] K. W. Dam, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, "The Financial Front of the War on 
Terrorism - the Next Phase," address delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations, 
New York, 8 June 2002. 



[100] Robert O'Harrow Jr., David S. Hilzencath, and Karende Young, "Bin Laden's 
Money Takes Hidden Paths to Agents of Terror, "Washington Post, 21 September 2001, 
p. A13: see also testimony of Matthew A. Levitt, US House of Representatives 
Subcommittee on International Trade and Finance, Committee on Banking, Housing and 
Urban Affairs, Washington DC, 1 August 2002. 



[101] "Following the Terrorists' Money, "Business Week Online, 1 October 2001 



[102] See US Department of the Treasury, 

www.treas.qov/offices/enforcement/ofac/actions/index html , for updates. 



[103] J. M. Dorsey, "Saudi Arabia is Monitoring Key Bank Accounts, "Wall Street 
Journal, 6 February 2002. 



[104] "Saudis Issue Order to Freeze Terrorist-Linked Assets. " USATODAY.com , 3 
March 2003. 



[105] Matthew Levitt, "Targeting Terror," position paper, Washington Institute for Near 
East Policy, 2002. See also "Subversion from Within: Saudi Funding of Islamic 



Extremist Groups Undermining US Interests and the War on Terror from within the 
United States," testimony of Matthew Levitt, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee 
on Terrorism, United States Senate, 10 September 2003, Washington DC. 



[106) R. Lacey, The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Saud, New York: Harcourt 
Brace Jovanovich, 1981, p. 323. 



[107] "Banking in the Kingdom, "Gulf States Newsletter, no. 515, 17 July 1995. 



[108] The Muslim Brotherhood Movement homepage for 2001 provided substantial 
information: www.ummah.org.uk/ikhwan/index.html . 



[109] Pierre Pean, LExtremiste Francois Genoud. de Hitler a Carlos, Paris: Fayard, 
1996. 



[110] C. M. Henry, "Guest Editor's Introduction, "Thunderbird International Review of 
Business, special issue on Islamic finance, July 1999. 



[111] F. E. Vogel and S. L. Hayes II, Islamic Law and Finance: Religion, Risk, and 
Return, The Hague and Boston: Kluwer Law Intl, 1998, p. 176. 



[112] First Islamic Banking Conference, Toronto, Canada, 25 May 1995, co-sponsored 
by the Islamic Society of North America, Zafar & Associates, and the American Journal 
of Islamic Finance. 



[113] "Sudan: Islamic Banking. " http:reference.allrefer.com for the Sudan, 1991 



[114] "Moves Begin to Set up Sharia Bank in UK." www.zawva.com . 10 November 2002. 



[115] "Banking in the Kingdom" see also Andrew Cunningham, Banking in the Middle 
East, London: Financial Times Publishing, 1995. 



[116] "Written Testimony of Jean-Charles Brisard," US Senate document: 
www.senate.Qov/~banking/ files/brisard.pdf . 2003. 



[117] Clement M. Henry, The Mediterranean Debt Crescent: Money and Power in Algeria, 
Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey, Cairo: American University Press, 1996. 



[118] Henry, "Guest Editor's Introduction." 



[119] Marc Roche, "La Grande discretion des banques 'islamiques,'"Le Monde, 18 
September 2001 . 



[120] No mention is made of Kaki involvement in either M. Potts et aL, Dirty Money, 
Washington DC: National Press Books, 1992, or P. Truell and L. Gurwin, False Profits, 
New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992. 



[121] "Banking in the Kingdom " 



[122] "The Press on the BCCI-bin Mahfouz-bin Laden Intelligence, "Boston Herald, 11 
December 2001. 



[123] See articles in the Boston Herald lor 14 October, 10 and 11 December 2001. 



[124] "The Press on the BCCI-bin Mahfouz-bin Laden Intelligence Nexus." 



[125] Seth Stern, "Can a Trillion-Dollar Lawsuit Stop Saudi Terror-Cash Flow?" Christian 
Science Monitor, 20 August 2002; "Families of September 11 Victims to Sue Alleged 
al-Qaeda Paymaster/Mdd/e East Times, issue 33, August 2002. 



[126] G. Simpson and R. Wartzman, "US Probes Saudi Conglomerate for Links to 
Islamic Militants, "Wall Street Journal, 2 November 2001 . 



[127] "The United States and Italy Designate Twenty-Five New Financiers of Terror," US 
Department of the Treasury, Office of Public Affairs, 

www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/po3380.tm . 29 August 2002. 



[128] Translation from the German: "Report: Al-Taqwa Finance Company 



Searched, "Neuen lurcher Zeitung (www.nzz.ch ), 8 November 2001 



[129] Lucy Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" Salon.com , 15 March, 2002; 
Mark Hosenball, "Terror's Cash Flow,"A/eivswee/c, 25 March 2002. 



[130] Testimony of Juan C. Zarate, Deputy Assistant Secretary, US Department of the 
Treasury. House Financial Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 12 February 
2002. 



[131] Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" 



[132] M. Huband, "Bankrolling Bin Laden, "Financial Times, 29 November 2002 



[133] "The United States and Italy Designate Twenty-Five New Financiers of Terror." 



[134] "Saudi Front Divided in the War on Terrorism, "Gulf States Newsletter, no. 672, 17 
October 2001 . 



[135] Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" 



[136] P. W. Rasche, "The Politics of Three - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, 
Israel. " www.druckversion.studien-von-Zeitfragen.net . 2002. 



[137] "Bin Laden's Money Takes Hidden Paths to Agents of Terror." 



[138] The bibliography for hawala is not large, but perhaps the most succinct analysis is 
in Patrick M. Jost and Harjit Singh Sandhu, "The Hawala Alternative Remittance System 
and its Role in Money Laundering, " www. Interpol 

Int/Public/FinancialCrime/MonevLaunderinq/hawala/default.Asp . 6 June 2004. See also 
Thomas H. Kean (Chair) and Lee H. Hamilton (Vice Chair), 9/11 Report: National 
Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States with Reporting and Analysis by 
the New York Times, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004, chap. 2. 



[139] M. Falkov, "The Wahhabites' Anti-Eurasian Crimes, "Arktogaia Forum on 
Geopolitics and Politology, Moscow, 1 1 April 2001 . 



4 Afghanistan beginnings 



[140] See Quran, Sura 62; Mahmoud Haddad, "Salafiyya Movement," in P. Mattar (ed ), 
Encyclopedia o! the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Farmington Hills, Ml: Thomson 
Gale, 2004, vol. II, pp. 1973-1975; T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, London: W. H. 
Allen, 1885, pp 548-549; "Indonesian Background: Why Salafism and Terrorism Don't 
Mix," International Crisis Group, Asia Report, no. 83, Brussels, 13 September 2004. 



[141] "Holy War on the World," Financial Times, FT.com . 17 April 2004. 



[142] J. Calvert, "The World is an Undutiful Boy: Sayyid Qutb's American 
Experience, "Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 11, no. 1, 2000, pp. 87-103; M. 



Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, London: Granta, 2002, p. 83 



[143] P. Berman, "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,"A/eiv York Times Magazine, 23 
March 2003 



[144] "Robert Irwin on Sayyid Qutb, the Father of Modern Islamist 
Fundamentalism, "Guardian, 1 November 2001 . 



[145] J. Adams, The New Spies, London: Hutchinson, 1994, pp. 180-181: B. R. Rubin, 
The Search for Peace in Afghanistan, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 



[146] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War," Compass News 
Service, London, 28 October 1994: see also J. K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, 
America and International Terrorism, London, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000: M. Griffin, 
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, London, Sterling, VA: 
Pluto Press, 2001. 



[147] "The Striving Sheik": Abdullah Azzam,"Nida'ul Islam, no 14 
www.speednet.com.au/~nida . July-September 1996. Azzam's most influential work is 
llhaq bi l-q filah (Join the Caravan), Pakistan, 1986. 



[148] W. B. Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 
1981, pp. 42-43. 



[149] "The Striving Sheik." 



[150] M. J. Grinfeld, "Mental Health Consequences of Conflict Neglected, "Psychiatric 
Times, vol. 19, no. 4, April 2002. 



[151] "Mujahid Usamah Bin Ladm, "Nida'ul Islam, no. 15, www.speednet.com.au/--nida , 
October-November 1996. 



[152] V. Loeb, "A Global, Pan-Islamic Network: Terrorism Entrepreneur Unifies Groups 
Financially, Politically, "Washington Post, 23 August 1998. 



[153] L. Bergman and M. Smith, Hunting Bin Laden, PBS TV, Washington, DC, 21 
March 2000. 



[154] F. Symon, Analysis: The Roots of Jihad, BBC News, 16 October 2001 



[155] Paul Harris and Martin Bright, "Saudi Envoy in UK Linked to 9/11, "Observer, 2 
March 2003 



[156] Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, New York: Berkeley Books, 2002, pp. 26-27 



[157] M. Weaver, "Blowback,"77ie Atlantic Online, May 1996. 



[158] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War." 



[159] S. Emerson, "Abdullah Assam: The Man before Osama Bin Laden," International 
Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, 

www.iacsp.com/itobli3.html . 



[160] "Attack on Terrorism - Inside al-Qaeda: Holy War on the World,' 1 Financial Times, 
special report, 28 November 2002. 



[161] A. Marshall, "Terror 'Blowback' Burns CIAS, The Independent, London, 1 
November 1998. 



[162] B. Whitaker, "Egyptian Doctor who Laid the Foundations for Global 
Jihad," Guardian, 20 March 2004. 



[163] L. Wright, "The Man Behind bin Laden, 'The New Yorker, 16 September 2002. 



[164] C. T. Miller, "The Alleged Brains behind bin Laden, "Los Angeles Times, 2 October 
2001. 



[165] T. Valdmanis, "Egyptian Masterminds Behind bin Laden, "USA Today, 11 October 



2001. 



[166] N. Raphaeli, "Radical Islamist Profiles: Ayman Muhammad Rabi' al-Zawahiri: The 
Making of an Arch Terrorist," Special Dispatch, MEMRI, 1 1 March 2003. 



[167] David Ignatius, "US Fears Sudan Becoming Terrorists"New Lebanon, '"Washing- 
ton Post, 31 January 1992, p. 13; Tarun Basu, "Pakistan Called an 'Incubator' of 
Terrorism, "India Abroad, 1 December 1995; Cooley, Unholy Wars, pp. 33 ff. 



[168] Weaver, "Blowback." 



[169] "Islam on Trial: The Case of Sheikh Omar Abdul- 
Rahman , "azzajri@rja!!thej\netrnaj^^ 



[170] E. A. Gargan., "Afghan President Says US Should See him as Ally against 
Militant Islam, "New York Times, 10 March 1992. In 1999 Afghanistan accounted for 
4,500 tons of opium or 75 percent of the world's production that year, worth $183 million 
at the farmgate. See Ahmad Rashid, "The Year in Afghanistan: 2000,"Afghanistanko- 
miteen: Norge, Oslo, 2001. 



[171] R. Weintraub, "Afghanistan to Allow Outside Refugee Aid, "Washington Post, 17 
May 1988. 



[172] "The Striving Sheik." 



[173] J. Millard Burr and Robert 0. Collins, Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and 
the Islamist State, 1989-2000, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pp. 69-73. 



[174] Miller, "The Alleged Brains behind bin Laden." 



[175] "Treasury Department Statement on the Designation of Wa'el Hamza Julidan," 
Department of the Treasury, Office of Public Affairs, 6 September 2002. 



[176] Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, Boulder, CO: 
Lynne Rienner, 2003. 



[177] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramez Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future 
of Terrorism. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. 



[178] "Khadr Tied to al-Qaeda as Far Back as 1988,"A/af/ona/ Post, Canada, 1 
February 2003. 



[179] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War " 



[180] "Trial Testimony, USA v. Usama bin Laden," US Federal Court. New York City, 
January-May 2001 . 



[181] A. Martin and M.J. Berens, 'Terrorists Evolved in US "Chicago Tribune, 11 
December 2001 



[182) Khaleej Times, Saudi Arabia, 8 September 2002 



[183] "Confusion over Linking Saudi Businessman with Osama, "Dawn, Pakistan, 9 
September 2002. 



[184] "Saudi Spy Chief 'Surprised' over Action against bin Laden Associate, "AFP, 7 
September 2002. 



[185] See www.satp.org/satporatp/countries/pakistan/ . This site provides information on 
other trusts supporting terrorist organizations 



[186] "US Designates Al Akhtar Trust," US Department of the Treasury, Office of Public 
Affairs, 14 October 2003. 



[187] Mahmood Zahman, "Blood, Sweat, Tears, "Dawn, Pakistan, 11 September 1997 



[188] After 9/11 Pakistan banned the Al Rashid Trust and Akhtar was reportedly 
"whisked off' to the Gulf by "one of his Arab friends" after the Taliban defeat in 2002. 



See also "The Great Banuri Town Seminary, "Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan, 20-26 
February 2004. 



[189] P. Escobar, "The Roving Eye: Anatomy of a Terrorist' NGO, "Asia Times, 26 
October 2001 . 



[190] South Asia Analysis Group, paper no. 330, 27 September 2001. 



[191] "Al-Qaeda Still Spreading, Warns UN Group." smh. com.au . Stanley Morning 
Herald, Australia, 2 December 2003. 



[192] "How Charity Begins in Saudi Arabia, "Asia Times online, www.atimes.com . 16 
January 2004. 



5 Islamic charities and the revolutionary Sudan 



[193] Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, Washington, 
DC: Brookings Institution, 1995, p. 16. 



[194] On BADEA see Dunstan M. Wai, "African-Arab Relations: Interdependence or 
Misplaced Optimism?" Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1983. 



[195] K. Gannon, "Pakistan Deporting 89 Arab Aid Workers," AP, Peshawar, 6 October 



2001. 



[196] B. Mudawi, "How Islamic Banks can Aid Governments, "Arabia, January 1984, 
pp. 58-59; B. Mudawi, "Islamic Bank in Africa, "The Muslim World, 23 July 1983, p. 5. 



[197] R. Labeviere, Dollars for Terrorism: The United States and Islam, New York: Algora 
Publishing, 2000, p. 85. 



[198] "The Banking System: Its History in Sudan, "Sudanow, June 1991. 



[199] "Sharia Support Fund: Guaranteeing Justice and Welfare, "Sudanow, March 1991. 



[200] "Muhammad al-Bashir Muhammad al-Hady, the Secretary of the Sudanese 
Information Ministry to 'Nida'ul Islam, '"Nida'ul Islam, 

www.islam.org.au/articles/17/sudan.htm . pp. 2-3, 1997. 



[201] Sudan 1991: USA v. All Mohamed, Guilty Plea in US Embassy Bombings, Court 
Reporters Office of the Southern District of New York, 24 October 2000. 



[202] 1996 US Department of State Report, Washington DC 



[203] "Usama bin Laden: A Legend Gone Wrong, "The Muslim Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4, 



1998. 



[204] "Frontline, " www.pbs.orq/wqbh/Daqes/frontline/shows/binladen/who/fainilv.html . 
2001. 



[205] R. Woodward, "Bin Laden Said to 'Own' the Taliban, "Washington Post, 11 
October. 2001 . 



[206] R. Sale. "Collapse of BCCI Shorts Bin Laden," UPI, Washington DC, 1 March 
2000. 



[207] J. Kenny, OP, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa," Consultation of the 
Christian Councils in West Africa on Christian-Muslim Relations, Monrovia, 25-28 
November 1984, in Christianity and Islam in Dialogue, Cape Coast: Association of 
Episcopal Conferences of Anglophone West Africa, 1987, pp. 77-83. 



[208] "Saudi-Arabian stiffen Koran-Exemplare""lslamische Welt-Liga: Hauptanliegen 
bleibt die Verkundigung""lslamische Liga entsendet Prediger in alle Welt," all in 
Deutsche Welle-Kirchenlunk, 20 April 1983, p. 4; 29 June 1983, p. 1: 30 May 1984, 
p. 2, respectively. 



[209] News of the Day Section, Wall Street Journal, 16 March 1992, p. 10. 



[210] "Sudan: Munadamat al Da'wah Al Islamiyah (Islamic Call Organization)," Qatar 
News Agency, 24 April 1997. 



[211] D. D. Akuany, Can There be a Sustainable Peace, Democracy, and Development 
under Sectarian Political Islam? Experience from Sudan, New Sudan African Society 
publication (pamphlet), 2003. 



[212] "Islamic African Relief Agency, "TheMuslim World, 10 September 1983, p. 2 



[213] 0. H. Kasule, "Islamic Da'wa in Africa: Methods and Strategy, "The Universal 
Message, May 1984, pp. 6-9. 



[214] "Islamic African Relief Agency." 



[215] Gannon, "Pakistan Deporting 89 Arab Aid Workers." 



[216] "Saudi Commitment to Establishing Islamic Centers, Mosques and Institutes," 
Saudi Arabian Information Resource, 15 February 2002. 



[217] Kenny, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa." 



[218] "Islamic African Centre, Khartoum, "Al-lslam, June 1983 



[219] Akuany, Can There be a Sustainable Peace, Democracy, and Development? 



[220] "Comprehensive Da'awa Programme Targets Social Renewal, "New Horizon, 
Khartoum, 4 August 1994, p. 2; "Salih Lashes Out at Population Conference, "New 
Horizon, Khartoum, 7 September 1994, p. 4. 



[221] "Islam, Democracy, the State and the West; Roundtable with Dr. Hassan 
Turabi, "Middle East Policy, vol. 1, no.3, 1992, pp. 49-61; see also "Tourabi, Hassan 
A\,"Agence Europe, European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab 
Cooperation, April 2004; J. Miller, "Faces of Fundamentalism; Hassan al-Turabi and 
Muhammad Fadlallah,"Fore/g/?Affa/rs, no. 11-12, 1994, p. 127. 



[222] See D. Hurst, "Dark Times Loom for Visionary Sudan, "Guardian, 26 May 1997 



[223] Y. Bodansky and V. S. Forrest, "Iran's European Springboard?" Congressional 
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, US House of Representatives, 
Washington DC, 1 September 1992. 



[224] S. Lautze, "International and National Islamic NGOs in Sudan, "Sudanow, 
Khartoum, November 1992. 



[225] "The Connection/Tampa Tribune, 28-29 May 1995 



[226] Hasan al-Turabi, "Islamic Fundamentalism in the Sunna and Shia World," speech, 
Madrid, Spain, 2 August 1994. 



[227] Y. Bodansky, "Arafat - Between Jihad and Survivalism,"T/?e Maccabean, May 
1997. 



[228] "Islam, Democracy, the State and the West." 



[229] Al Wasat, London, 14-20 December 1992, pp. 22-25: on HAMAS, Fatah, and the 
Khartoum connection, see Al Watan Al Arabi, 30 October 1992, pp. 21-22. 



[230] J. Flint, "Under Islamic Siege, "Africa Report, September/October 1993, p. 26. 



[231] "Dudaev Calls for Islamic Alliance against West," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 
Research Institute Daily Report, Washington DC, no. 226, 26 November 1993. 



[232] Bodansky and Forrest, "Iran's European Springboard?" 



[233] S. Gangadharan, "Exploring Jihad: The Case of Algeria, "Strategic Affairs, issue 
0014, 1 February 2001 . 



[234] "Algerian Terrorism," in Patterns of Global Terrorism 1993, Office of the 
Coordinator for Counterterrorism, US Department of State, April 1994. 



[235] R. Rahal, "Charities Thriving Despite US Warnings. "Middle East Times, issue 18, 
2002. 



[236] J. M. Burr and R. 0. Collins. Requiem for the Sudan. Boulder: Westview Press, 
1995. 



[237] R. Block et al., "US Targets Saudi Accounts," 3 March 2003, 
www.qlobetechnoloqv.com/archive/20011015/WJFEAT.html . 



[238] "Sudan/Egypt: Calling the Shots after Addis Ababa, "Africa Confidential vol. 3b, 
no. 14, July 1995, pp. 11-14. 



[239] Ibid.; also "Saudi Says he Has Not Given Money to Bin 
Laden, " www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/10/15/inv.saudi.frozen. assets . 15 October 
2001. 



[240] "Middle East: Bin Laden 'Received UN Cash,'" BBC News, 20 October 2001. 



[241] "Saudi Says he has Not Given Money to Bin Laden: 



[242] M. Yared, "Soudan, le Sabre et le Coran," Jeune Afrique, 33: 1674, 4 January-10 
February 1993, pp. 24-26, at p. 4. 



[243] SUNA Radio, Khartoum, 16:37 GMT, 12 January 1993; "Near East and South 
Asia," FBIS, 15 January 1993, p. 1. 



[244] R. Sale, "Analysis: The Man behind Bin Laden," UPI, Washington DC, 25 March 
2004. 



[245] W. Millward, "The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism (II)," Canadian Security 
Intelligence Service, Commentary No. 31, April 1993. 



[246] J. Parmalee, "Waltzing with Warlords, "Washington Post, 20 June 1993. 



[247] Millward, "The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism." 



[248] "Sudanese-Iranian Relations Shift up a Gear,"Sudan Democratic Gazette, 
London, February 1993, p. 4: "Relapse to Clan Warfare, "The Middle East, January 
1992, p. 25. 



[249] Jerry Seper, "KLA Rebels Train in Terrorist Camps, "Washington Times., 4 May 
1994. 



[250] Horn of Africa Bulletin, derived from an Indian Ocean Newsletter report. 6 March 
1993. 



[251] K. Allard, "Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned," National Defense Publication, 
Institute for National Strategic Studies, January 1995; "Usama bin Laden: A Legend 
Gone Wrong." 



[252] "Somali Group Claims Victory in NW," AP, 15 June 1997 



[253] D Bricker and L. Leatherbee, Balancing Consensus and Dissent: The Prospects 
for Human Rights and Democracy in the Horn of Africa (pamphlet), Horn of Africa 
Program, New York: Fund for Peace, January 1994. 



[254] K. Kelley, "Saudi Charity Accused of Plotting to Bomb Zanzibar Hotels, US 
Charges, "The East African, Nairobi, 26 January 2004. 



[255] "Uganda: Some ADF Rebels Reportedly Trained under Bin-Ladin Auspices," BBC 
Monitoring Service, 18 October 2001 , from The New Vision, Kampala. 



[256] "Saudi with Royal Links Seized in CIA Terror 

Swoop," www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0.2089-736695.00.html . July 2003. 



[257] H. Weiss, "Zakat in Pre-Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. A Tentative Survey, Part 
Three" (private distribution). 



[258] Kenny, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa." 



[259] "Islamic Foundation in Nigeria, "The Muslim World, 5 March 1983, p. 4. 



[260] "NGO in Nigeria for Promoting Islam," Abeokuta, Nigeria, www. islam-online. net , 
26 January 2002. 



6 Islam at war in the Balkans 



[261] A. Izetbegovic, Le Manifesto islamique, Beirut: Al Bouraq, 1999 



[262] A. Cerkez-Robinson, "Bosnia," AP Sarajevo, 23 March 2002. In 1996 the SJRC 
changed its name to the Saudi High Relief Commission (SHCR), but the major patrons 
and administrative staff remained the same. 



[263) Ibid. 



[264] "Polish Press Reports on Training of Mujahideen in Bosnia," TANJUG, 
Yugoslavia, 16 December 1997. 



[265] "Bosnian Leader Hails Islam at Election Rallies, "New York Times, 2 September 
1996. 



[266] "Muslim Chief Hints at the Use of Chemicals, "New York Times, 31 October 1992. 



[267] "Islam's Legion Seeks Blood in Bosnia, "Observer, London, 18 October 1992. 



[268] "Help from the Holy Warriors, "Newsweek, 5 October 1992. 



[269] "Islamic Nations will Take it upon Themselves to Arm the Bosnians," Staff 
Reporter, Wall Street Journal, 3 December 1992. 



[270] Michael R. Gordon, "Weapons Shipment Intercepted on Way to Bosnia, "New York 
Times, 26 January 1993. 



[271] Tony Horwitz, "Bosnia Muslims Threaten to Quit Geneva Talks, "Washington Post, 
28 January 1993. 



[272) James Risen and Doyle McManns, "US Had Options to Let Bosnia Get Arms, 
Avoid Iran, "Los Ange/es Times, 1 July 1996. 



[273] See Y. Bodansky, Target America, Terrorism in theUSToday, Terror, the Inside 
Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America, Offensive in the Balkans, Alexandria, VA: 
International Strategic Studies Association, 1995 



[274] R. Fisk, "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts his Army on the Road to Peace, "Independent, 
London, 6 December 1993. 



[275] "The Role of Austria in Financing the Moslem Government."Sert)/a Today. 2 April 
1996. 



[276] IRNA, Vienna dateline, 23 June 1993. 



[277] "Austrians Intent on Balanced Trade with Iran Says Ambassador," IRNA, 1 
September 1993. 



[278) "Tehran-Khartoum Ties Principled: Sudanese Parliament Speaker/' IRNA, 
Tehran, 18 August 1993. 



[279] JPRS-TOT-94-026-1, 7 July 1994, from a TANJUG Radio report in English, 24 
June 1994, and derived in part from the Turkish daily Milliyet. 



[280] By 1997 the UAE Red Crescent had devoted 134,012 million dirhams 
(approximately $50 million) to Bosnia, its largest contribution for any state (see 
http://uae.dmedia.co.kr ). Two UAE banks kept "cadres of staff whose sole job is to cater 
to individual cash demands, which could be anything" from $500,000 to $2 million 
{Financial Times, FT.com . "Arabia Bridles at Americans' Insistence on al-Qaeda Cash," 
19 February 2002). 



[281] K. Hechtman, "Charitable Acts of War, "Montreal Mirror, 21 November 2002. 



[282] Fisk, "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts his Army on the Road to Peace." His interview with 
Turabi appeared in the Independent on 3 December 1993. 



[283] "Bin Laden's Balkan Connections," Centre for Peace in the Balkans, September 
2001; "Bin Laden was Granted Bosnian Passport," AFP, Sarajevo, 24 September 1999. 
Other Al Qaeda leaders who traveled on Bosnian passports included the Tunisian-born 
Mehrez Aodouni, who was arrested in Istanbul in September 1999. 



[284] "Hostages to a Brutal Past,"USWeivs & World Report, 15 February 1993, p. 56. 



Islamic Militants, "Wa// Street Journal , 2 November 2001. 



[127] "The United States and Italy Designate Twenty-Five New Financiers of Terror," US 
Department of the Treasury, Office of Public Affairs, 
www. ustreas.gov/press/releases/po3380.tm . 29 August 2002. 



[128] Translation from the German: "Report: Al-Taqwa Finance Company 
Searched, "Neuen Zurcher Zeitung (www.nzz.ch ), 8 November 2001. 



[129] Lucy Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" Salon.com . 15 March, 2002; 
Mark Hosenball, "Terror's Cash Flow,"A/eivswee/c, 25 March 2002. 



[130] Testimony of Juan C. Zarate, Deputy Assistant Secretary, US Department of the 
Treasury, House Financial Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, 12 February 
2002. 



[131] Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" 



[132] M. Huband, "Bankrolling Bin Laden, "Financial Times, 29 November 2002 



[133] "The United States and Italy Designate Twenty-Five New Financiers of Terror." 



[134] "Saudi Front Divided in the War on Terrorism, "Guff States Newsletter, no. 672, 17 
October 2001 . 



[135] Komisar, "Shareholders in the Bank of Terror?" 



[136] P. W. Rasche, "The Politics of Three - Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, 
Israel, " www.druckversion.studien-von-Zeitfraqen.net . 2002. 



[137] "Bin Laden's Money Takes Hidden Paths to Agents of Terror." 



[138] The bibliography for hawala is not large, but perhaps the most succinct analysis is 
in Patrick M. Jost and Harjit Singh Sandhu, "The Hawala Alternative Remittance System 
and its Role in Money Laundering. " www. interpol 

Int/Public/FinancialCrime/MonevLaunderinq/hawala/default.Asp , 6 June 2004. See also 
Thomas H. Kean (Chair) and Lee H. Hamilton (Vice Chair), 9/11 Report: National 
Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States with Reporting and Analysis by 
the New York Times, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004, chap. 2. 



[139] M. Falkov, "The Wahhabites' Anti-Eurasian Crimes, "Arktogaia Forum on 
Geopolitics and Politotogy, Moscow, 1 1 April 2001 . 



4 Afghanistan beginnings 



[140] See Quran, Sura 62: Mahmoud Haddad, "Salafiyya Movement," in P. Mattar (ed.), 
Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, Farmington Hills, Ml: Thomson 
Gale, 2004, vol. II, pp. 1973-1975; T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, London: W. H. 
Allen, 1885, pp. 548-549: "Indonesian Background: Why Salafism and Terrorism Don't 
Mix," International Crisis Group, Asia Report, no. 83, Brussels, 13 September 2004. 



[141] "Holy War on the World," Financial Times, FT com . 17 April 2004. 



[142] J. Calvert, "The World is an Undutiful Boy: Sayyid Qutb's American 
Experience,"/s/am and Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 11, no. 1, 2000, pp. 87-103; M. 
Ruthven, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, London: Granta, 2002, p. 83. 



[143] P. Berman, "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror/'A/ew York Times Magazine. 23 
March 2003. 



[144] "Robert Irwin on Sayyid Qutb, the Father of Modern Islamist 
Fundamentalism, ''Guardian, 1 November 2001 . 



[145] J. Adams, The New Spies, London: Hutchinson, 1994, pp. 180-181; B R. Rubin, 
The Search for Peace in Afghanistan, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 



[146] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War," Compass News 
Service, London, 28 October 1994; see also J. K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, 
America and International Terrorism, London, Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000; M. Griffin, 
Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, London, Sterling, VA: 



Pluto Press, 2001 



[147] "The Striving Sheik": Abdullah Azzam,"Nida'ul Islam, no 14 
www.speednet.com.au/--nida , July-September 1996. Azzam's most influential work is 
llhaq bi l-q filah (Join the Caravan), Pakistan, 1986. 



[148) W. B. Quandt. Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 
1981, pp. 42-43. 



[149] "The Striving Sheik." 



[150] M. J. Grinfeld, "Mental Health Consequences of Conflict Neglected, "Psychiatric 
Times, vol. 19, no. 4, April 2002. 



[151] "Mujahid Usamah Bin Ladin, "Nida'ul Islam, no. 15, www.speednet.com.au/~nida . 
October-November 1996 



[152] V. Loeb, "A Global, Pan-Islamic Network: Terrorism Entrepreneur Unifies Groups 
Financially, Politically, "Washington Post, 23 August 1998. 



[153] L. Bergman and M. Smith, Hunting Bin Laden, PBS TV, Washington, DC, 21 
March 2000 



[154] F. Symon, Analysis: The Roots of Jihad, BBC News, 16 October 2001 



[155] Paul Harris and Martin Bright, "Saudi Envoy in UK Linked to 9/ 11, "Observer, 2 
March 2003. 



[156] Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, New York: Berkeley Books, 2002, pp. 26-27 



[157] M. Weaver, "Blowback.'T/ie Atlantic Online, May 1996. 



[158] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War " 



[159] S. Emerson, "Abdullah Assam: The Man before Osama Bin Laden," International 
Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, 

www.iacsp.com/itobli3.html . 



[160] "Attack on Terrorism - Inside al-Qaeda: Holy War on the World," Financial Times, 
special report, 28 November 2002. 



[161] A. Marshall, "Terror 'Blowback' Burns CIAS, "The Independent, London, 1 
November 1998. 



[162) B Whitaker, "Egyptian Doctor who Laid the Foundations for Global 
Jihad,"Gt/ard/an, 20 March 2004. 



[163] L. Wright, "The Man Behind bin Laden, "The New Yorker, 16 September 2002 



[164] C. T. Miller, "The Alleged Brains behind bin Laden, "Los Angeles Times, 2 October 
2001. 



[165] T. Valdmanis, "Egyptian Masterminds Behind bin Laden, "USA Today, 11 October 
2001. 



[166] N. Raphaeli, "Radical Islamist Profiles: Ayman Muhammad Rabi' al-Zawahiri: The 
Making of an Arch Terrorist," Special Dispatch, MEMRI, 11 March 2003. 



[167] David Ignatius, "US Fears Sudan Becoming Terrorists"New Lebanon, '"Washing- 
ton Post, 31 January 1992, p. 13; Tarun Basu, "Pakistan Called an 'Incubator' of 
Terrorism, "India Abroad, 1 December 1995; Cooley, Unholy Wars, pp. 33 ff. 



[168] Weaver, "Blowback." 



[169] "Islam on Trial: The Case of Sheikh Omar Abdul- 



Rahman. " azzamigipanlher.nelmania.co.uk . 



[170] E. A. Gargan., "Afghan President Says US Should See him as Ally against 
Militant Islam, "Weiv York Times, 10 March 1992. In 1999 Afghanistan accounted for 
4,500 tons of opium or 75 percent of the world's production that year, worth $183 million 
at the farmgate. See Ahmad Rashid, "The Year in Afghanistan: 2000 "Afghanistanko- 
miteen: Norge, Oslo, 2001. 



[171] R. Weintraub, "Afghanistan to Allow Outside Refugee PiA," Washington Post, 17 
May 1988. 



[172] "The Striving Sheik." 



[173] J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins, Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and 
the Islamist State, 1989-2000, Leiden: Brill, 2003, pp. 69-73. 



[174] Miller, "The Alleged Brains behind bin Laden." 



[175] "Treasury Department Statement on the Designation of Wa'el Hamza Julidan," 
Department of the Treasury, Office of Public Affairs, 6 September 2002. 



[176] Zachary Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, Boulder, CO: 
Lynne Rienner, 2003. 



[177] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramez Youset Osama bin Laden, and the Future 
of Terrorism. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. 



[178] "Khadr Tied to al-Qaeda as Far Back as 1988,'National Post, Canada, 1 
February 2003. 



[179] "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan War Lead New Islamic Holy War." 



[180] Trial Testimony, USA v. Usama bin Laden" US Federal Court, New York City, 
January-May 2001 



[181] A. Martin and M.J. Berens, "Terrorists Evolved in US, "Chicago Tribune, 11 
December 2001 



[182] Khaleej Times, Saudi Arabia, 8 September 2002 



[183] "Confusion over Linking Saudi Businessman with Osama, "Dawn, Pakistan, 9 
September 2002. 



[184] "Saudi Spy Chief Surprised' over Action against bin Laden Associate, "AFP, 7 
September 2002. 



[185] See www.satp.org/satporcitp/counlries/pakistan/ . This site provides information on 
other trusts supporting terrorist organizations. 



[186] "US Designates Al Akhtar Trust," US Department of the Treasury, Office of Public 
Affairs, 14 October 2003. 



[187] Mahmood Zahman, "Blood, Sweat, Tears, "Dawn, Pakistan, 11 September 1997. 



[188] After 9/11 Pakistan banned the Al Rashid Trust and Akhtar was reportedly 
"whisked off' to the Gulf by "one of his Arab friends" after the Taliban defeat in 2002. 
See also "The Great Banuri Town Seminary, "Friday Times, Lahore, Pakistan, 20-26 
February 2004. 



[189] P. Escobar, "The Roving Eye: Anatomy of a 'Terrorist' NGO,"As/a Times, 26 
October 2001 



[190] South Asia Analysis Group, paper no. 330, 27 September 2001. 



[191] "Al-Qaeda Still Spreading, Warns UN Group, " smh.com.au , Stanley Morning 
Herald, Australia, 2 December 2003. 



[192] "How Charity Begins in Saudi Arabia, "Asia Times online, www.atimes.com . 16 
January 2004. 



5 Islamic charities and the revolutionary Sudan 



[193] Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, Washington, 
DC: Brookings Institution, 1995, p. 16. 



[194] On BADEA see Dunstan M. Wai, 'African-Arab Relations: Interdependence or 
Misplaced Optimism?" Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 1983. 



[195] K. Gannon, "Pakistan Deporting 89 Arab Aid Workers," AP, Peshawar, 6 October 
2001. 



[196] B. Mudawi, "How Islamic Banks can Aid Governments, "Arabia, January 1984, 
pp. 58-59; B. Mudawi, "Islamic Bank in Africa, "The Muslim World, 23 July 1983, p. 5. 



[197] R. Labeviere, Dollars for Terrorism: The United States and Islam, New York: Algora 
Publishing, 2000, p. 85. 



[198] "The Banking System: Its History in Sudan, "Sudanow, June 1991. 



[199] "Sharia Support Fund: Guaranteeing Justice and Welfare,"Sudanoiv, March 1991. 



[200] "Muhammad al-Bashir Muhammad al-Hady, the Secretary of the Sudanese 
Information Ministry to 'Nida'ul Islam, "'Nida'ul Islam, 

www.islam.org.au/atticles/17/sudan.htm . pp. 2-3, 1997. 



[201] Sudan 1991: USA v. Ali Mohamed, Guilty Plea in US Embassy Bombings, Court 
Reporters Office of the Southern District of New York, 24 October 2000 



[202] 1996 US Department of State Report, Washington DC 



[203] "Usama bin Laden: A Legend Gone Wrong, "The Muslim Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4, 
1998. 



[204] "Frontline. " www.pbs.org/wabh/paaes/frontline/shows/binladen/who/familv. html . 
2001. 



[205] R. Woodward, "Bin Laden Said to 'Own' the Taliban, "Washington Post, 11 
October, 2001 . 



[206] R. Sale, "Collapse of BCCI Shorts Bin Laden," UPI, Washington DC, 1 March 



2000. 



[207] J. Kenny, OP, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa," Consultation of the 
Christian Councils in West Africa on Christian-Muslim Relations, Monrovia, 25-28 
November 1984, in Christianity and Islam in Dialogue, Cape Coast: Association of 
Episcopal Conferences of Anglophone West Africa, 1987, pp. 77-83. 



[208] "Saudi-Arabian stiften Koran-Exemplare""lslamische Welt-Liga: Hauptanliegen 
bleibt die Verkundigung""lslamische Liga entsendet Prediger in alle Welt," all in 
Deutsche Welle-Kirchenfunk, 20 April 1983, p 4; 29 June 1983, p. 1: 30 May 1984, 
p. 2, respectively. 



[209] News of the Day Section, Wall Street Journal, 16 March 1992, p. 10. 



[210] "Sudan: Munadamat al Da'wah Al Islamiyah (Islamic Call Organization)," Qatar 
News Agency, 24 April 1997 



[211] D. D. Akuany, Can There be a Sustainable Peace, Democracy, and Development 
under Sectarian Political Islam? Experience from Sudan, New Sudan African Society 
publication (pamphlet), 2003. 



[212] "Islamic African Relief Agency," The Muslim World, 10 September 1983, p. 2. 



[213] O. H. Kasule, "Islamic Da'wa in Africa: Methods and Strategy," The Universal 
Message, May 1984, pp. 6-9. 



[214] "Islamic African Relief Agency." 



[215] Gannon, "Pakistan Deporting 89 Arab Aid Workers." 



[216] "Saudi Commitment to Establishing Islamic Centers, Mosques and Institutes," 
Saudi Arabian Information Resource, 15 February 2002. 



[217] Kenny, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa." 



[218] "Islamic African Centre, Khartoum, "Al-lslam, June 1983 



[219] Akuany, Can There be a Sustainable Peace, Democracy, and Development? 



[220] "Comprehensive Da'awa Programme Targets Social Renewal, "New Horizon, 
Khartoum, 4 August 1994, p. 2; "Salih Lashes Out at Population Conference, "New 
Horizon, Khartoum, 7 September 1994, p. 4. 



[221] "Islam, Democracy, the State and the West; Roundtable with Dr Hassan 
Turabi, "Middle East Policy, vol 1, no.3, 1992, pp. 49-61; see also "Tourabi, Hassan 
Ai,"Agence Europe, European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab 
Cooperation, April 2004; J. Miller, "Faces of Fundamentalism: Hassan al-Turabi and 



Muhammad Fadlallah, "Foreign Affairs, no. 11-12, 1994, p. 127. 



[222) See D. Hurst, "Dark Times Loom for Visionary Sudan, "Guardian, 26 May 1997. 



[223) Y. Bodansky and V. S. Forrest, "Iran's European Springboard?" Congressional 
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, US House of Representatives, 
Washington DC, 1 September 1992 



[224) S. Lautze, "International and National Islamic NGOs in Sudan, "Sudanow, 
Khartoum, November 1992. 



[225] "The Connection, Tampa Tribune, 28-29 May 1995 



[226) Hasan al-Turabi, "Islamic Fundamentalism in the Sunna and Shia World," speech, 
Madrid, Spain, 2 August 1994. 



[227] Y. Bodansky, "Arafat - Between Jihad and Survivalism,'T/je Maccabean, May 
1997. 



[228] "Islam, Democracy, the State and the West." 



[229] Al Wasat, London, 14-20 December 1992, pp. 22-25; on HAMAS, Fatah, and the 



Khartoum connection, see Al Watan Al Arabi , 30 October 1992, pp. 21-22 



[230] J. Flint, "Under Islamic Siege, "Africa Report, September/October 1993, p. 26. 



[231] "Dudaev Calls for Islamic Alliance against West," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 
Research Institute Daily Report, Washington DC, no. 226, 26 November 1993. 



[232] Bodansky and Forrest, "Iran's European Springboard?" 



[233] S. Gangadharan, "Exploring Jihad: The Case of Algeria, "Strategic Affairs, issue 
0014, 1 February 2001 . 



[234] "Algerian Terrorism," in Patterns of Global Terrorism 1993, Office of the 
Coordinator for Counterterrorism, US Department of State, April 1994. 



[235] R. Rahal, "Charities Thriving Despite US Warnings, "Middle East Times, issue 18, 
2002. 



[236] J. M. Burr and R. O. Collins, Requiem for the Sudan, Boulder: Westview Press, 
1995. 



[237] R. Block et al., "US Targets Saudi Accounts," 3 March 2003, 



www.qlobetechnoloqy.com/archive/2001 101 5/WJFEAT html . 



[238) "Sudan/Egypt: Calling the Shots after Addis Ababa "Africa Confidential, vol. 3b, 
no. 14, July 1995, pp. 11-14. 



[239] Ibid.; also "Saudi Says he Has Not Given Money to Bin 
Laden, " www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/10/15/inv.saudi.frozen. assets , 15 October 
2001. 



[240] "Middle East: Bin Laden 'Received UN Cash,'" BBC News, 20 October 2001. 



[241] "Saudi Says he has Not Given Money to Bin Laden." 



[242] M. Yared, "Soudan, le Sabre et le Coran,"Je«?e Afrique, 33: 1674, 4 January-10 
February 1993, pp. 24-26, at p. 4. 



[243] SUNA Radio, Khartoum, 16:37 GMT, 12 January 1993: "Near East and South 
Asia," FBIS, 15 January 1993, p. 1. 



[244] R. Sale, "Analysis: The Man behind Bin Laden," UPI, Washington DC, 25 March 
2004. 



[245] W. Millward, "The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism (II)," Canadian Security 
Intelligence Service, Commentary No. 31, April 1993. 



[246] J. Parmalee, "Waltzing with Warlords, "Washington Post, 20 June 1993. 



[247] Millward, "The Rising Tide of Islamic Fundamentalism." 



[248] "Sudanese-Iranian Relations Shift up a Gear "Sudan Democratic Gazette, 
London, February 1993, p. 4; "Relapse to Clan Warfare, "The Middle East, January 
1992, p. 25. 



[249] Jerry Seper. "KLA Rebels Train in Terrorist Camps, "Washington Times. 4 May 
1994. 



[250] Horn of Africa Bulletin, derived from an Indian Ocean Newsletter report, 6 March 
1993. 



[251] K. Allard, "Somalia Operations: Lessons Learned," National Defense Publication, 
Institute for National Strategic Studies, January 1995; "Usama bin Laden: A Legend 
Gone Wrong." 



[252] "Somali Group Claims Victory in NW," AP, 15 June 1997 



[253] D. Bricker and L. Leatherbee, Balancing Consensus and Dissent: The Prospects 
for Human Rights and Democracy in the Horn of Africa (pamphlet), Horn of Africa 
Program, New York: Fund for Peace, January 1994. 



[254] K. Kelley, "Saudi Charity Accused of Plotting to Bomb Zanzibar Hotels, US 
Charges, "The East African, Nairobi, 26 January 2004. 



[255] "Uganda: Some ADF Rebels Reportedly Trained under Bin-Ladin Auspices," BBC 
Monitoring Service, 18 October 2001 , from The New Vision, Kampala. 



[256] "Saudi with Royal Links Seized in CIA Terror 

Swoop," www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0.2089-736695.00 html . July 2003. 



[257] H. Weiss, "Zakat in Pre-Colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. A Tentative Survey, Part 
Three" (private distribution). 



[258] Kenny, "Arab Aid and Influence in Tropical Africa." 



[259] "Islamic Foundation in Nigeria, "The Muslim World, 5 March 1983, p. 4. 



[260] "NGO in Nigeria for Promoting Islam," Abeokuta, Nigeria, www.islam-online.net 
26 January 2002. 



6 Islam at war in the Balkans 



[261) A. Izetbegovic, Le Manifesto islamique, Beirut: Al Bouraq, 1999. 



[262] A. Cerkez-Robinson, "Bosnia," AP Sarajevo, 23 March 2002. In 1996 the SJRC 
changed its name to the Saudi High Relief Commission (SHCR), but the major patrons 
and administrative staff remained the same. 



[263] Ibid. 



[264] "Polish Press Reports on Training of Mujahideen in Bosnia," TANJUG, 
Yugoslavia, 16 December 1997. 



[265] "Bosnian Leader Hails Islam at Election Rallies, "New York Times., 2 September 
1996. 



[266] "Muslim Chief Hints at the Use of Chemicals, "New York Times, 31 October 1992 



[267] "Islam's Legion Seeks Blood In Bosnia, "Observer, London, 18 October 1992 



[268] "Help from the Holy Warriors, "Newsweek, 5 October 1992 



[269] "Islamic Nations will Take it upon Themselves to Arm the Bosnians," Staff 
Reporter, Wall Street Journal, 3 December 1992. 



[270] Michael R. Gordon, "Weapons Shipment Intercepted on Way to Bosnia, "New York 
Times, 26 January 1993 



[271] Tony Horwitz, "Bosnia Muslims Threaten to Quit Geneva Talks, "Washington Post, 
28 January 1993. 



[272] James Risen and Doyle McManns, "US Had Options to Let Bosnia Get Arms, 
Avoid Iran, "Los Ange/es Times, 1 July 1996. 



[273] See Y. Bodansky, 7arge( America, Terrorism in theUSToday, Terror, the Inside 
Story of the Terrorist Conspiracy in America, Offensive in the Balkans, Alexandria, VA: 
International Strategic Studies Association, 1995. 



[274] R. Fisk, "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts his Army on the Road to Peace,"lndependent. 



London, 6 December 1993 



[275] "The Role of Austria in Financing the Moslem Government,"Sert>/a Today, 2 April 
1996. 



[276) IRNA, Vienna dateline, 23 June 1993. 



[277] 'Austrians Intent on Balanced Trade with Iran Says Ambassador," IRNA, 1 
September 1993. 



[278] "Tehran-Khartoum Ties Principled: Sudanese Parliament Speaker," IRNA, 
Tehran, 18 August 1993. 



[279] JPRS-TOT-94-026-1, 7 July 1994, from a TANJUG Radio report in English, 24 
June 1994, and derived in part from the Turkish daily Milliyet. 



[280] By 1997 the UAE Red Crescent had devoted 134,012 million dirhams 
(approximately $50 million) to Bosnia, its largest contribution for any state (see 
http://uae.dmedia.co.kr ). Two UAE banks kept "cadres of staff whose sole job is to cater 
to individual cash demands, which could be anything" from $500,000 to $2 million 
(Financial Times, FT.com . "Arabia Bridles at Americans' Insistence on al-Qaeda Cash," 
19 February 2002). 



[281] K. Hechtman, "Charitable Acts of War, "Montreal Mirror, 21 November 2002. 



[282] Fisk, "Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts his Army on the Road to Peace." His interview with 
Turabi appeared in the Independent on 3 December 1993. 



[283] "Bin Laden's Balkan Connections," Centre for Peace in the Balkans, September 
2001; "Bin Laden was Granted Bosnian Passport," AFP, Sarajevo, 24 September 1999 
Other Al Qaeda leaders who traveled on Bosnian passports included the Tunisian-born 
Mehrez Aodouni, who was arrested in Istanbul in September 1999. 



[284] "Hostages to a Brutal Past,"t/SAfews & World Report, 15 February 1993, p. 56. 



[285] "Kabul is Khartoum's Latest Arms Supplier,"Sudan Democratic Gazette, London, 
October 1993, p. 6. 



[286] Foreign Report, London: Economist Newspaper Ltd., 1 July 1993. 



[287] "CIPF Investment Contacts, "New Horizon, Khartoum, 29 November 1994. 



[288] See Bodansky, Target America. 



[289] "New Peace Bid, "New Horizon, Khartoum, 1 June 1994, p. 1. 



[290] Vecernje Novosti, Yugoslavia, 2 April 1996. 



[291] J. Pomfret, "Arms-Supplies for Bosnia: How Bosnia's Muslims Dodged Arms 
Embargo, "Washington Post, 22 September 1996 



[292] Ibid. 



[293] Ibid 



[294] See www.vuQoslavia.com- Serbia Bulletin - October 1996; "Experts in 
Fear, "Politika through TANJUG, Tel Aviv dateline, 5 October 1995 



[295] Published in the economic journal Wirtschafts Woche, Austria, October 1995; see 
also "Fingerprints: Arms to Bosnia, the Real Story, "New Republic, 28 October 1996. 



[296] G. Bradic, "Muslim Humanitarian Organization Delivered Arms to 
Bosnia-Herzegovina," TANJUG, Vienna dateline, published in the Serbian Bulletin, 
October 1996. 



[297] Other charities: Bosnia Relief Fund, USA Inc. (Elk Grove, IL); Bosnian-American 
Cultural Association (Northbrook, IL); Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development 



(Richardson, TX, and Patterson, NJ); ICNA Relief; Albanian Islamic Cultural Center - 
Kosovo Relief (Staten Island, NY) collects for Macedonia under the name The Light; 
IKRE Fund (Sunnyside, NY); Jerrahi Order of America (Chestnut Ridge, NY); Mercy 
International-USA, Inc. (Plymouth, Ml) with an office in Albania, three offices in Bosnia, 
and one in Croatia: Save Bosnia Now, Ummah Relief International (Elgin, IL), and Al 
Haramain Educational Center (Ashland, OR) were also active in Bosnia. In Canada one 
found the Bosnian Children Relief (Toronto); Bosnian-Canadian Relief Association 
(Toronto); and World Humanity Fund, Inc. (Napean, Ontario). 



[298] F. Schmidt, "Refugees Return to Bosnia from Macedonia, "OMRIDaily Digest, vol. 
1, no. 108, 5 June 1995. 



[299] "Velayati: OIC Plan," IRNA, Tehran, 14 July 1993 



[300] Senate Select Committee Report on Iran/Bosnia Arms Transfers, United States 
Senate, November 1996. 



[301] R. Fox, "Iran's Cases of Cash 'Helped Buy Muslim Victory in Bosnia,'" 
International News, Electronic Telegraph, London, www.teleqraph.co.uk , 1 January 
1997. 



[302] United States of America v. Aldurahman Muhammad Alamoudi, US District Court 
for the Eastern District of Virginia, Criminal Case No. 03-A, 22 October 2003. 



[303] J. Smith, "A Bosnian Village's Terrorist Ties, "Washington Post.. 11 March 2000. 



[304] Fox, "Iran's Cases of Cash 'Helped Buy Muslim Victory in Bosnia.'" 



[305] In March the USA began arming the Bosnian military with light weapons. See M. 
Mihalka, "News, "Serbia Today, 2 April 1996; M. Mihalka, "Mujaheddin Remaining in 
Bosnia: Islamic Militants Strongarm Civilians, Defy Dayton P\an,"Washington Post, 8 
July 1996. 



[306] Saudi Public Affairs Reports "On the Bosnian Situation," Embassy of Saudi 
Arabia, Washington DC, 26 September 1996; see also "Kingdom Assists Bosnian 
Refugees," 3 September 1996. 



[307] B. Whitmore, "Bosnian Charities Tied to Terror,"fiosfon Globe, 3 July 2002, 
http://www.bostonqlobe.com . 



[308] "Islamic Charity, Leader Charged, "Chicago Tribune, 14 May 2004. 



[309] J. Brisard, "Written Testimony of Jean-Charles Brisard, International Expert on 
Terrorism Financing and Lead Investigator, 9/11 

La ws u it, " www.senate.gov/~bankinq/ files/brisard.pdf . 



[310] M. Vickers and J. Pettifer, Albania: From Anarchy to a Balkan Identity, New York 
New York University Press, 1997. 



[311] Ibid., p. 105. 



[312] S. Rodan, "Central European Diary: Kosovo Seen as New Islamic 
Bastion "Jerusalem Post, 14 September 1998. 



[313] Ibid 



[314] A. Higgins and C. Cooper, "CIA-Backed Team Used Brutal Means to Break up 
Terrorist Cell in Albania," Wa// Street Journal, 20 November 2001 . 



[315] Rodan, "Central European Diary." 



[316] S. Trifkovic, "The Balkan Terror Threat,"T/?e Greco Report, 
http://www.qrecoreport.com , 2003. 



[317] Sunday Times, London, 22 March 1998; Washington Times, 4 May 1999 



[318] Higgins and Cooper, "CIA-Backed Team." 



[319] "Third Egyptian Accused of Terrorism Arrested in Tirana," Albanian Telegraphic 
Agency, Tirana, 21 July 1998. 



[320] Higgins and Cooper, "CIA-Backed Team " 



[321] A. Bala, "Albania: Officials Crack Down on Terror Suspects," Radio Free 
Europe/Radio Liberty, 27 January 2002 



[322] Isa Blumi, "Indoctrinating Albanians: Dynamics of Islamic Aid," International 
Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World Newsletter, November 2002 



[323] "Kosovo Asks for US, UN Help to Keep Serbs from Attacking, "Chicago Tribune, 
17 February 1993. 



[324] T. Siefer, "Same 'Charities' Follow CIA & Bin Laden to Kosovo & 
Chechnya, " www libertyforum.orq/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news news&NuSynopsis . 
23 July 2003. 



[325] Rodan, "Central European Diary." 



[326] C. Stephen, "US Tackles Islamic Militancy in Kosovo, "Scotsman, 30 November 



1998. 



[327] B. Williams, "Jihad and Ethnicity in Post Communist Eurasia, "The Global Review 
ofEthnopolilics, vol. 2, March/June 2003. 



[328] Siefer, "Same "Charities' Follow CIA." 



[329] "Sudan Plans Relief Flight for Kosovo Moslems," AFP, Khartoum, 30 April 1999. 



[330] M. Epstein and B. Schmidt, "Operation Support-System Shutdown, "National 
Review Online, 4 September 2003. 



[331] Review of his memoirs Inescapable Questions: Autobiographical Notes, 



www.anqelfire.com/dc/rnbooks/izetbovic htmll 



[332] D. Pallister, "Terrorist Material Found in Sarajevo Charity, "Guardian, 23 February 
2002; M. Levitt, "Tackling the Financing of Terrorism in Saudi Arabia, "Policywatch, no. 
609, Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 11 March 2002. 



[333] A. Dragicevic, "Bosnian Official Says al-Qaida Planned Attack on 
Embassy, "North County Times, San Diego, California, 24 March 2002. 



[334] Whitmore, "Bosnian Charities Tied to Terror." 



7 Russia and the Central Asian Crescent 



[335] "The Taliban is our Ally" (translated from the Russian), Novy Peterburg, St. 
Petersburg, no. 55, 13 December 2001. 



[336] "Russia's Mufti Council, "Pravda, 19 July 2001 



[337] "Chechnya: The Paths to Settlement,""lslamic Threat or Threat to Islam, "Eurasia, 
All-Russian Social Political Movement Conference, Moscow, 28 June 2001. 



[338] M. Karim, "The Revival of Islam in Central Asia and 
Caucasus, " www.renaissance.com.pk/ferefl. html . 1995 



[339] D. Fairbairn, "Islam in the Soviet Era, "East-West Church & Ministry Report, vol 2, 
no. 4, Fall 1994. 



[340] A. Khamidov, "Countering the Call: The US, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, and Religious 
Extremism in Central As\a,"USPolicy Towards the Islamic World, Analysis Paper no. 4, 
Brookings Institution, 4 July 2003. 



[341] Hizb ut-Tahnr, London: Al-Khalifah Publications; see also Suha Taji-Farouki, A 
Fundamental Quest Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Search for the Islamic Caliphate, London: 
Grey Seal, 1996. 



[342] Press conference release by Hizb ut-Tahrir in Denmark, www.hizb-ut- 
tahrir.info/english/ . 21 January 2004; on the origins of HuT see "Al-Muhajiroun in the 
UK: An Interview with Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad. " www.al- 
muhaaiiroun.com/articles/interview.htm . 



[343] A. Cohen, "Hizb ut-Tahrir: An Emerging Threat to US Interest in Central 
Asia "Backgrounder, no. 1656, Heritage Foundation, 30 May 2003. 



[344] M. Whine, "Al-Muhajiroun: The Portal for Britain's Suicide Terrorists," 
International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 21 May 2003. 



[345] "Russian Troops Drop CIS Figleaf, Will Stay in Tajikistan, "Monitor, Jamestown 
Foundation. 8 April 1999; "Russia Obtains Military Basing Rights in Tajikistan, "Monitor, 
21 April 1999. 



[346] K. Parshin, "Tajik Government Fears Fundamentalist Spread," Transitions Online, 
27 March 2001 , www.eurasia.net.org/departments/insiqht/articles/eav032701.shtml . 



[347] "Tajik Government Fears Spread of Call of Hizb-ut-Tahrir." www.hizb-ut-tahir.org . 
31 March 2001; "Tajikistan Court Sentences Nine Islamists to Death, "Daily Times, 



Pakistan, 27 February 2003 



[348] "Chechnya: The Paths to Settlement," and "Islamic Threat or Threat to Islam," 
All-Russian Social Political Movement Conference, Eurasia, Moscow 28 June 2001. 



[349] M. Falkov, "Arktogaia Forum April 2001: The Wahhabites' Anti-Eurasian Crimes," 
policy paper, Arktogaia Forum on Geopolitics and Politology, 1 1 April 2001 . 



[350] V. Ilyain and I. Radzhabov, "Soviet Legacy Cannot Help Bothering the 
West," Defense and Security, no. 42, 12 April 2002. 



[351] The complexities of this struggle focused on the Ferghana Valley are beyond the 
scope of this work. See Calming the Ferghana Valley, New York: Center for Preventive 
Action, Century Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations Books, 1999. 



[352] J. Balfour, "Bukharans Shun Radical Islam," Institute for War and Peace, 
London, report no. 30, 17 November 200. 



[353] Ibid 



[354] D. Frantz, "Central Asia Braces to Fight Islamic Rebels, "New York Times, 3 May 
2001. 



[355] G. Curtis, "Drug Funded Terrorist/Extremist Groups in Central Asia," in A Global 
Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extemist Groups, Washington DC: 
Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, May 2002. 



[356] Whine, "Al-Muhajiroun." 



[357] IRIN, www.irinnews.org , Tashkent, 24 May 2004. 



[353] "Uzbekistan: Uneasy Calm Reigns after Attacks," Institute for War and Peace, 
London, report no. 275, 6 April 2004; "Uzbekistan: Affluent Suicide Bombers," report 
no. 278, 20 April 2004; "No Place for Uzbek Muslims," report no. 213, 1 July 2003, 
respectively. 



[359] S. Jumagulov, "Kyrgyzstan's Cautious Mullahs," Institute for War and Peace, 
report no. 279, Washington DC, 23 April 2004; A. Nuritov, "Musharraf Vows to Extradite 
Uzbek Militants,"Ara*) Nevis, 7 March 2005. 



[360] "Turkmenistan: No to Foreign Education," Institute for War and Peace, London, 
report no. 285, 18 May 2004. 



[361] "Experts: Religious Persecution Rife in Turkmenistan, Washington, DC - May 20, 
2004," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 21 May 2004. 



[362] "Niyazov Addresses Youth Meeting, Reads Excerpts from his New Book," 
ITAR-TASS news agency, Moscow, in Russian, 08:51 GMT, 7 May 2004. See also 
www.eurasianet.org/Turkmenistan , "Weekly News Brief on Turkmenistan, ""Turkmenistan 
Marks Remembrance Day on May 8, ""Turkmen President Donates 100,000 Dollars to 
War Veterans," 7-13 May 2004. 



[363] "Resolution by the President of Turkmenistan on Deeming Invalid the Resolution 
by the Turkmen President Issued on 23 March 2004," Turkmen government website, 
Ashgabat, BBC in Russian, 13 May 2004. 



[364] See www.qatewav2russia.com/columns.is , 1 February 2004; "Paper Says 
'Terrorist' Body Funds Southern Kazakh College, "Gateway to Russia, Kazakhstanskaya 
Pravda, 28 January 2004. 



[365] "Islam in Central Asia. " www.cimera.org/files/CP/CP1/4EAInivasov.pdf . 



[366] D. Dosybiev, "Kazakstan Tackles Hizb ut-Tahrir," Institute for War and Peace, 
Washington DC, report no. 276, 14 April 2004. 



[367] "Islam in Central Asia," p. 87. 



[368] D. Nissman, "Central Asia's Political Leaders Struggle to Control Islamic 
Influence, "Prism, Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC, 22 September 1995. 



[369] "Preventing Another Great Game' in Central Asia," Washington DC: Center for 
Defense Information, January 2001; A. Higgins, "Bloc Including Chinas, Russia 
Challenges US in Central Asia, "Wall Street Journal, 18 June 2001. 



[370] P. Romero, "China to Push Formation of Asian Anti-Terror Alliance, "Star Manila, 
1 September 2003. 



[371] Press Club Weekly, no 15, Yerevan, 25 January 2002. The suspect Kuwaiti 
charity had already been active in Egypt. See Youssef M. Ibrahim, "Saudis Strip 
Citizenship from Backer of Militants, "New York Times, 10 April 1994. 



[372] P. Baker, "15 Tied to Al Qaeda Turned Over to US "Washington Post, 22 October 
2002. On Chechnya in 2002 see Seven Lee Myers, "Russia Recasts Bog in Caucasus 
as War on Terror,"A/ew York Times, 5 October 2002. 



[373] "Georgian Security Minister Unveils Classified Details on Pankisi,"C;V;7 Georgia, 
www civil. gelcqi-bin/newsprof/fullnews.cgi ; P. Quinn-Judge, "The Surprise in the 
Gorge, "Time, 20 October 2002; Dore Gold, "Saudi Arabia and Global Terrorism: From 
Al Qaeda to HAMAS," Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia hearing, US 
House of Representatives, Washington DC, 15 July 2003. 



[374] "Government Launches Probe into Islamic Charity after FBI Tip," AP, Tbilisi 
dateline, 10 November 2002 



[375] "Georgia: Saakashvili Sees in 'Wahhabism' a Threat to Secularism," Georgia in 
the Foreign Press, www.kvali.com . 14 June 2004. 



[376] A. Nokhchi, "Islamic Movement in Chechnya," 21 June 2001, www.deia.com . 



[377] "Dudayev Calls for Islamic Alliance against the West," Radio Free Europe/Radio 
Liberty Research Institute, Daily Report, no 226, Washington DC, 26 November 1993; 
B. G. Williams, '"Chechen Arabs: An Introduction to the Real al Qaeda Terrorists from 
Chechnya," policy paper, Jamestown Foundation, Washington DC, vol. 1, no 9, 15 
January 2004. 



[378] J. Corbin, The Base. In Search of Al Qaeda, London: Simon & Schuster, 2002, 
p. 55. See also Williams, '"Chechen Arabs" A. Lievan, "Al Qaida at the Fringe of a 
Bloody National Struggle,"Guard/an, 26 October 2002. 



[379] Williams, "'Chechen Arabs" David Holley, "Chechen Separatist Leader is Slain: 
The Death of Asian Maskhadov, a Relative Moderate, Dims Hopes for Peace with 
Russia, "Los Angeles Times, 8 March 2005. 



[380] The website was accessed through http://www.benevolence.org . 



[381] Williams, '"Chechen Arabs.'" 



[382] "Salafism (as-Salafiyya) Factor in Central Asia and Northern Caucasus, "Bakhtiyar 
Mirkasymov, 2002. 



[383] A. McGregor, "Khan of the Kremlin: Charm and Murder in the Middle East," 
position paper, Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, May 2004. 



[384] "CIA Stresses Russian Role in Proliferation; Moscow Focuses on Terrorism 
Financing, "Russia Reform Monitor, no 1003, American Foreign Policy Council, 
Washington DC, 10 January 2003. 



[385] "Charity Director Charged with Aiding al Qaeda," CNN News, 9 October 2002. 



[386] "Report on Chechnya, " www. islamicvoice.com/Januarv 2000 ; Izvestia broadcast, 
Russia, 08:00:33 PDT, 18 October 2000, from Russia Reform Monitor, no. 1003, 
American Foreign Policy Council, Washington DC, 10 January 2003. 



[387] A. Higgins and A. Cullison, "Saga of Dr. Zawahiri, "Moscow Times via Wall Street 
Journal, see www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2002/07/04/203.html . 



[388] "ISN - Information Services Security Watch," Center for Security Studies, 
Zurich, Switzerland (from Moscow Times), July 2000. 



[389] "Ikraa - Activities of Arab Extremists, "Defense and Security, Russian Monitoring 
Agency, no. 42, 12 April 2002. 



[390] Falkov, "Arktogaia Forum 2001." 



[391] "Russia's Horror "Economist, 11-17 September 2004, p. 9 



[392] "Russia to Propose Expanding UN List of Terrorist Groups, "Los Angeles Times, 
24 September 2004, p. A5. 



[393] Nickolai Silayev, quoted in "Chechnya's Borders Can't Contain Conflict,"Los 
Angeles Times, 26 February 2005, pp. A1, 8, 9. 



8 From Afghanistan to Southeast Asia 



[394] Z. Abuza, Militant Islam in Southeast Asia: Crucible of Terror, Boulder, CO: Lynne 
Rienner Publishers, 2003, p. 104. 



[395] Ibid., p 178. 



[396) Shaykh Abu Zahir, "The Moro Jihad: A Continuous Struggle for Islamic 
Independence in Southern Philippines, "Nida'ul-lslam, no. 23, www.islam.orq.au . 
April-May 1998. 



[397] "MIFL Leader to Nida'ul-lslam,"Nida'ul Islam, no. 23, www.islam.orq.au . April-May 
1998. 



[398] Ibid. 



[399] Reyko Huang, "Moro Islamic Liberation Front," Printer-Friend, 15 February 2002, 

www.cdi.org/terrorism/moro , cfm+. 



[400] Reihana Mohideen, "Philipines: Moro Islamic Liberation Front Rejects 'Terrorist' 
Slander,"GreenLe/? Weekly, Chippendale, New South Wales, 28 July 2004. 



[401] "A Legend Gone Wrong: Researched and Compiled by Shaykh Muhammad 
Hisham Kabbani and Mateen Siddiqui,"/Wi/s//m Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4, 1999. 



[402] Rodolfo Bauzon Mendoza, Jr., Philippine Jihad Inc., Philippine National Police 
publication, 11 September 2002, p. 27. 



[403) Ibid., p. 44 



[404] Ibid., pp. 34-36. 



[405] D. Z. Sicat, "Abu's Long-Standing Ties to Global Terrorism Bared, "Manila Times 
Internet Edition, www.manilatimes.net . 15 February 2002. 



[406] Abuza, Militant Islam, pp. 24, 67, 92, 94, 115 



[407] Mendoza, Philippine Jihad Inc.; on Khalifa's life in Saudi Arabia, see "A Blueprint 
for 9/11," CBS Evening News, 17 January 2003. 



[408] Mendoza, Philippine Jihad Inc., pp. 61-62. 



[409] M. D. Vitug, "The New Believers, "Newsbreak, Manila, 27 May 2002. 



[410] Mendoza, Philippine Jihad Inc., p. 30. 



[411] Middle East Intelligence Wire Gulf News, 29 September 2001 . 



[412] Vitug, "The New Believers " 



[413] On this struggle, see Thomas McKenna, Muslim Rulers and Rebels: Everyday 
Politics and Armed Separatism in the Southern Philippines, Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1998. 



[414] Middle East Intelligence Wire Gulf News, 29 September 2001 . 



[415] R Abou-Alsamh, "Is Gemma-Cruz a Terrorist?"Ma/?//a Moods, 
www.manilamoods.com/archive/160800.shtml . 16 August 2000. 



[416] S. Elegant, "The Return of Abu Sayyaf,T/me (Asia), 23 August, 2004. 



[417] E. Van Dalen, "Philippines Move a Step Closer to Peace Tuesday, "RNAsia, Radio 
Netherlands, www.rnw.nl . 7 August 2001 . 



[418] Elegant, "The Return of Abu Sayyaf." 



[419] "The Abu Sayyaf-AI Qaeda Connection, " ABCNEWS.com . New York, 20 
December 2001 . 



[420] J. Gomez, "In Philippines, Islamic Militants Regroup," AP, 24 April 2004. 



[421] "Terrorists 'Seek Muslim Converts,'" CNN News, CNN.com , 9 May 2004. 



[422] R. Landingin, "Philippines Uncovers al-Qaeda Linked Operation, "Financial Times, 
6 May 2004. 



[423] M. G. G. Pillai, "The Bin Ladens and a Kedah Prawn Farm, "KM2 reports, 
http://lamankm2c.tripod.com/ccqi-bin/form.CQi . 15 April 2002. 



[424] Jay Solomon, "Manila Suspends Talks with Rebels after Allegations of al-Qaeda 
Links," Wa// Street Journal, 12 March 2002. 



[425] Terrorism in Southeast Asia and International Linkages, Usindo Open Forum, 
United States-Indonesia Society, Washington DC, 4 December 2002; "Riduan 
lsamuddin." www.nationamaster.com/encvclopedia/Riduan-lsamuddin+Riduan+&hl=en . 



[426] "Hambali Used RM2 mil Collected from Donations to Fund his Extremist 



Operations, "The Star, Malaysia, 1 January 2003. 
[427] See www.fbi.aov/conaress/congress02/lormel021202.htm 



[428] "Nik Adli Identified as Militant Group Leader "The Star Malaysia, 9 August 2001 



[429] "Hambali Used RM2 mil." 



[430] FBI periodic reports on terrorism can be found at 

www.fbi.aov/conaress/conaress02/lormel021202.htm , 2 December 2002. 



[431] S. Young, "Muslims Seek Islamic State, "Washington Times, 13 November 2003 



[432] Z. Abuza, "Asia Hasn't Stopped the Terror Funding, "Asian Wall Street Journal, 1 
October 2003. 



[433] V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, New York: Alfred A. 
Knopf, 1981 



[434] "Profile: Jemaah Islamiah - Shadowy Advocate of Islamic Caliphate," Reuters, 
Jakarta, 16 October 2002. 



[435] J. Perlez, "Saudis Quietly Promote Strict Islam in lndonesia,"A/eiv York Tunes, 5 
July 2003. 



[436] "Indonesian Linked to al Qaeda Cell, " CNN. com /World, 
http:edition.cnn.com/2002/World/ . 19 July 2002; "Intelligence Report: Bin Laden Sought 
Indonesian Base," CNN. com/World . http:edition.cnn.com/2002/World/ . 9 July 2002. 



[437] M. Levitt, "Combating Terrorist Financing, Despite the Saudis, "PolicyWatch no. 
673, Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1 November 2002; M. 
Levitt, "How Al Qaeda Lit the Bali Fuse: Part II, "Christian Science Monitor, 17 June 
2003. 



[438] A. Sipress and E. Nakashima, "Militant Alliance in Asia is to Seek Regional 
Islamic State,"Washington Post Foreign Service, 19 September 2002. 



[439] Dana Priest, "A Nightmare, and a Mystery, in the Jungle, "Washington Post, 22 
June 2003; "Bin Laden Named in Asian Terror Plots, "Washington Post, 27 June 2003; 
"Indonesian Army's Upper Hand, "Washington Post, 26 June 2003. 



[440] D. Murphy, "A Village in Java Tells Story of Militant Islam's Growth, "Christian 
Science Monitor, 23 January 2003. 



[441] Perlez, "Saudis Quietly Promote Strict Islam in Indonesia." 



[442) US Department of the Treasury, press release, 19 February 2004. 



[443] A. Holt, "Thailand's Troubled Border: Islamic Insurgency or Criminal Playground?" 
Article appeared in the Jamestown Foundation, www.iamestown.ora/indexphp ; 
Terrorism Monitor, reproduced by the Asia Pacific Media Network, www.w3.org/ . 20 
May 2004. 



[444) "Thailand: Arrests Block Islamic Terror Plot, "St Petersburg Times, Russia, 11 
June 2003. 



[445] "THAILAND: Separatism Rising in Southern Thailand after Years of Peace, "New 
Straits Times, www.nst.com.mv . 5 April 2004; "Thai Violence Rages on as PM Visits 
Restive South," AFP, Krong Pinang, Thailand, 7 May 2004. 



[446] "Cambodia Boots Saudi Religious School, "Las Vegas Sun, 28 May 2003 



[447] "The Inside Story of How US Terrorist Hunters are Going after al Qaeda,"USA/eivs 
& World Report, 2 June 2003. 



[448] E. Sohail, "Poems of the Tresses: The Arab Assault on our 
Culture, " www. paktodav.com/poems. htm , 27 February 2004. 



[449] B. Raman, "Bangladesh: A Bengali Abbasi Lurking Somewhere?" South Asia 
Analysis Group, paper no. 232, 23 April 2001. 



[450] "Professor Gulam Azam, " www. islam-bd.org/GolamAzam/ , 10 April 2004. 



[451] B. Raman, "Bangladesh." 



[452] Ibid 



[453] S. Babar, quoted in "Is Religious Extremism on the Rise in Bangladesh?" Asia 
Pacific Media Services Ltd., www.asiapacificms.com/articles/ , 10 May 2004. 



[454] A. Roy, "Bangla Outfit Recruits Cadres for Jihad, "Telegraph. Calcutta, 7 July 
1999. 



[455] B. Raman, "Bangladesh and Jihadi Terrorism - an Update," South Asia Analysis 
Group, paper no. 887, 7 January 2004: S. Page, "Death of Evangelist Highlights 
Growing Tension in Bangladesh," Project Open Book, www.domini.org . Dublin, Ireland, 
23 May 2003 



[456] Raman, "Bangladesh and Jihadi Terrorism." 



[457] A. Perry, "Deadly Cargo, "Time, Asian Magazine, 
http://time/asia/maqazine/0.13764.5011021.00.htm . 



[458] "Saudi Charities Do Not Die," Reuters, 5 June 2004 



[459] "Letter Dated 1 December 2003 from the Chairman of the Security Council 
Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1267 (1999) concerning Al-Qaida and 
the Taleban," UN Security Council, S/2003/1070, 2 December 2003, pp. 3, 8. 



[460] "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2003," Office of the Coordinator for 
Counterterrorism, US Department of State, Washington DC, 29 April 2004. 



9 The Holy Land 



[461] Timur Kuran, "Islamic Redistribution through zakat Historical Record and Modern 
Realities," in Bonner et al. (eds ), Poverty and Chanty in Middle Eastern Contexts, 
p. 278. 



[462] In May 2001 ICRC began to pay the costs of PRCS's ambulance fleet and 
salaries for its 220 employees. 



[463] W. B. Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 



1981, pp. 32-33 



[464] HAMAS, Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood: Islamic Extremists and the 
Terrorist Threat to America (pamphlet), New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1993. 



[465] United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine: Division for 
Palestinian Rights, vol. Mil, Bulletin no. 9, September 1991. 



[466] Nil Shahar, "The Israel Connection, "MaariM International, 7 July 2004 



[467] Fadhl al-Naqib, The Palestinian Economy in the West Bank and Gaza, Jerusalem 
Center for Palestinian Studies, April 1997. 



[468] Nil Shahar, "The Israel Connection, "Maariv International, 25 July 2004. 



[469] Y. Barsky, Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, New York: American Jewish 
Committee, 2002, pp. 9-12. 



[470] Anti-Defamation League, HAMAS, Islamic Jihad, and the Muslim Brotherhood. 



[471] The organizations comprising the Unified National Leadership of the Uprising 
included the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command; 



Palestinian National Liberation Movement - Fatah (Abu Musa faction); the Islamic Jihad 
Movement in Palestine: Al Saiqa Forces; the Popular Front for the Liberation of 
Palestine; the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the Revolutionary 
Palestinian Communist Party; the Palestine Popular Struggle Front; the Palestine 
Liberation Front; and HAMAS. 



[472] From the Islamic Solidarity, Concord and Unity meeting held in Dakar, Senegal, 
9-11 December 1991. 



[473] "HAMAS Invests in US Real Estate, "Middle East Newsline, Washington DC, 23 
May 1999; M. Epstein and B. Schmidt, "Operation Support-System Shutdown, "National 
Review Online, www.nationalreview.com , 4 September 2003. 



[474] Labeviere, Dollars for Terrorism, pp. 144-145, footnote 31. 



[475] L. T. O'Brien, "US Presses Saudis to Police Accounts Used to Aid 
Palestinians, "New York Times Online, www.nvtimes.com/ 24 June 2003; "Saudis Admit 
Funding HAMAS/' WorldTribune.com . Washington DC, 13 June 2003. 



[476] "Patterns of Global Terrorism," Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, US 
Department of State, Publication 10136, April 1994; on Iranian funding see "Testimony 
of Michael A. Sheehan, US Department of State Coordinator for Counterterrorism," 
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, 2 
November 1999. 



[477] "The Metamorphosis of HAMAS," Jerusalem Report, 14 January 1993 



[478] "Muslims Fight On over Banned Charity," BBC News, UK, www.w3 . orq/TR/REC- 
html40/loose . 11 September 2003. 



[479] D. Sanger and J. Miller, "Bush Freezes Assets of Biggest US Muslim 
Charity,"A/eiv York Times, 5 December 2001; C. H. Schmitt et al., "When Charity Goes 
Awry, "USNews & World Report, 29 October 2001. 



[480] D. Gold, "Saudi Arabia and Global Terrorism: From al-Qaeda to HAMAS," 
presentation to Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, US House of 
Representatives, 15 July 2003: E. Alden and M. Mann, "Brussels Moves to Block Assets 
of 11 Terrorist Organizations, "Financial Times, 3 May 2002. 



[481] "Germany Bans 'Pro-HAMAS' Charitv." CNN.com/World . 5 August 2002. 



[482] "UK and US Freeze Islamic Charity," BBC News, UK, 30 May 2003 



[483] "Schumer: Virginia Charity Linked to HAMAS and Saudis has Escaped Federal 
Charges," Senate Office of Senator Charles Schumer, Washington DC. 17 September 
2003. 



[484] "The HAMAS Asset Freeze and Other Government Efforts to Stop Terrorists 
Financing," E. Anthony Wayne, Assistant Secretary for Economic and Business 
Affairs, Department of State, to the House of Representatives Committee on Financial 
Services, 24 September 2003. 



[485] D. Frankfurter, "The Sad Joke of 'Palestinian Aid. '" FrontPaqeMaqazine.com . 2 
March 2005. 



[486] S. Lakind and Y. Carmon, "The PA Economy "Inquiry and Analysis Series - No. 
11, MEMRI, 8 January 1999, footnote 8. 



[487] "OPIC Signs Protocol for $60 Million Private Equity Fund in Gaza, West Bank and 
Jordan Projects, "Forward, 11 December 1998; OPIC press release, 17 November 1997; 
"OPIC's Politically Connected Investors Can't Lose as US Taxpayers Shoulder the 
Risks," Center for Responsive Politics, 15 January 1998. 



[488] A. Kushner, Disclosed: Inside the Palestinian Authority and thePLO, Jerusalem: 
Pavilion Press, 2004; "Getting Past Arafat, "Jerusalem Post, 
http://info.post.com/C003/Supplements/FSB/030905 . 9 May 2003. 



[489] For IMF documents on Palestine and public finance see www-wds.worldbank.org .. 
report for 14 April 2004. 



[490] "The HAMAS - Background, " www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ HAMAS. htm , August 
1997. 



[491] Documents can be accessed at: "Arafat Knew: Charity Money Forwarded to 
Terror Infrastructure," Centrum Informatie en Documentatie Israel, Netherlands, 
www.cidi.nl . 25 January 2003. 



[492] A. Lerner, "HAMAS Leader Abu Hamdan - Interview in Hamshahri,"/MRARev/e», 
24 August 1997, from Hamshahri, Iran, 21 August 1997. 



[493] "Peace Process - HAMAS, "Middle East Security Report, vol. 1, no. 38, 1 October 
1997. 



[494] "Getting Past Arafat." 



[495] W. Amr, "Israeli Troops Hit Banks in Raid on Arafat HQ City," Reuters, Ramallah, 
25 February 2004. 



[496] "In Brief "AynAI Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 31 March 2000. 



[497] "Kingdom Will Never Fight Islamic Trends Says Prince Ahmed, "Arab News, 15 
January 2003. 



[498] MEMRI, www.memri.org/bin/ . See article SR 1703"_edn4 



[499] J. Dougherty, "Saudi Royals Funding Palestinian Jihad, " www. worldnetdailv.com , 
9 July 2003. 



[500] Ibid 



[501] "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Approves the Establishment of Al Quds 
Center at King Abd Al-Aziz Foundation, "Ayn Al Yaqeen, 21 September 2001 ; "Scholars 
and Experts Praise King Fahd Approval for the Establishment of the Al Quds Center for 
Studies and Researchers, ".4yn .4/ Yaqeen, 12 October 2001. 



[502] "Editorial: Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian issue," Ayn Al Yaqeen, 25 May 2001 



[503] "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Stands by the Palestinian People, their Rights and 
Defending the Holy Places, "AynAI Yaqeen, 20 October 2000 



[504] International Christian Embassy Jerusalem report, 10 February 2002, footnote 57 



[505] K. R. Timmerman, "Documents Detail Saudi Terror Links, "Insight, 20 May 2002, 
www.insiQhtmaa.com . 



[506] C. Brisard, "Written Testimony of Jean-Charles Brisard International Expert on 
Terrorism Financing Lead Investigator, 9/11 Lawsuit," Senate of the United States, 
http://www.senate.gov/~bankinq/ files/brisard.pdf . 



[507] "Saudi Arabia and the Arab Countries Insist on Holding the Arab Summit in Beirut 
on T\me,"AynAI Yaqeen, 11 January 2002. 



[508] "Al-Anzy, the First Arab POW Returns from Afghanistan," lslamOnline.net, 
Kuwait, 9 February 2002. 



[509] L. P. Cohen et al., "Bush's Financial War on Terrorism Includes Strikes at Islamic 
Charities, "Wall Street Journal, 25 September 2001; J. Mintz, "From Veil of Secrecy, 
Portraits of US Prisoners Emerge, "Washington Post, 15 March 2002, p. A3. 



[510] 'Terrorism Weighs on US-Saudi Relations. "Washington Times, 26 November 
2002. 



[511] "SR410 Million Collected in Cash during the Saudi Telethon Campaign in Support 
of the Palestinians, "Ayn Al Yaqeen, 19 April 2002. 



[512] "Kingdom's Support for Palestine Remains Exemplary, "Saudi Gazette, 22 March 
2002. 



[513] "Kingdom Supports Palestinians with Extra Money," Saudi Press Agency, 31 
October 2002; "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Cause, "Ayn Al 
Yaqeen, 3 January 2003; "Saudi Arabian Information Resource Aid for 
Palestine, " www.saudinf.com/main/v4066. htm . 8 January 2003. 



[514] "Saudi Committee for the Support of the Al Quds Intifada Executes 27 Programs 
and Projects," Saudi Press Agency, 1 May 2003. 



[515] A. R. AN, "HAMAS, Jihad Defy Sharm el-Shaykh Summit," lslamOnline.net, 
Kuwait, 4 June 2003. footnote 71. 



[516] IDF spokesman, "Text of Arabic Document: Arafat Knew: Charity Money 
Forwarded to Terror Infrastructure," Tel Aviv: Kokhaviv Publications, 23 January 2003; 
Arabic original posted at www.idf.il/newsite/ . Ronni Shaked, former Israeli General 
Security Service (Shin Bet) official and Arab Affairs editor of Yedioth Ahronoth, 
commented at length on HAMAS fundraising in a book based on interviews with 
imprisoned HAMAS operatives. The book, HAMAS: Me-emunah be-Allah le-derekh 
ha-teror ("From faith in Allah to the path of terror"), was a limited printing and could not 
be located by the authors. 



[517] "Palestinian Authority Freezes Funds of Islamic Charities, "USA Today, 28 August 
2003; "Muslim Groups' Funds Frozen," AP, Gaza City, 29 August 2003. 



[518] M. A. Levitt, "Charity Begins in Riyadh, "Weekly Standard, 2 February 2004. 



[519] M. Malkin, "Ambulances for 

Terrorists, " www.frontpaQemaQ.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1 3627 . 2 June 2004. 



[520] M. Dudkevich, "Army Seals Offices of HAMAS Charity Organizations, "Jerusalem 



Post, online edition, www.jpost.com , 8 July 2004. 



[521) "UN Report: 63 Percent of Palestinians Below Poverty Line," Reuters, Beirut, 30 
August 2004. 



[522] "Iran Increases Funding and Training for Suicide Bombings," MEMRI Special 
Dispatch Series, no. 387, 11 June 2002. 



[523 j Ibid 



[524] M. Karouny, "Lebanon's Hizbullah Serves Needy, Gains Support," Reuters, 
Beirut, 28 February 2003. 



[525] Hanson Hosein, NBC News, 10 May 2003, as reported in www.moqawama.tv . 



[526] A. W. Same, "Tehran, Washington and Terror: No Agreement to Differ,"M/dd/e 
East Review of International Affairs, vol. 6, no. 3, September 2002. 



10 The Muslim Invasion of Europe 



[527] D. Crawford, "How a Diplomat from Saudi Arabia Spread his Faith, "Wall Street 
Journal, 10 September 2003. 



[528) "The Saudis Withdrew Berlin Diplomat after Germans Cite Possible Militant 
Link," Gulf Wire Digest, issue no. 208, pp. 4-10, 28 April 2003; "Saudi Installations under 
Surveillance in Germany, Report Says. " http://www.aarialink.com , Khaleej Times Online, 
2 August 2003. 



[529] Turkish expatriates commonly access Diyanet Isleri Turk Islam Birligi at its 
website, www.divanet.org . 



[530] G. Kepel, "The Trail of Political Islam, " http://opendemocracv.net . 7 March 2002 



[531] S. Trifkovic, "Jihad's Fifth Column in the West. TrontPaqeMagazine.com , 7 
January 2003; S. Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet, Boston: Regina Orthodox Press, 
2002; on data see A. de Borchgrave, "Al Qaeda's US Network, "Washington Times, 13 
August 2004. 



[532] H. Brucker et al., "Managing Migration in the European Welfare State," in Third 
European Convention of the Debenedetti Foundation, Trieste: Debenedetti Foundation, 
June 2001 



[533] S. Wheeler, "EU to Freeze Terror Assets," BBC News, Strasbourg, 4 October 
2001. 



[534] E. Ganley, "Europe Uses Drastic Laws to Beat Terror," AP, 23 September 2001 



[535] "Berlin Terror Trial Witness Names Saudi Diplomat, Journal 
Says. " Bloomberg. com , 2 June 2004. 



[536] See articles by M. Forbes in The Age, Australia, www.theaqe.com.au . 11-13 July 
2003. 



[537] I. Johnson and D. Crawford, "A Saudi Group Spreads Extremism in 'Law' 
Semnars," Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2003. 



[538] M. Robinson, "Attorney Denies Muslim Charity's European Director Aided Osama 
bin Laden's Terror Network," AP, Chicago, 6 May 2002 



[539] C. Simpson et aL, "Bin Laden Aide Tied to Bridgeview Group, "Chicago Tribune, 6 
May 2002. 



[540] "German Police Raid Arabic Charity," AP, Berlin, 16 August 2002. 



[541] Posted on lslamOnline.net, dateline Bonn, 25 July 2003 



[542] "Al-Qaeda Suspects Extradited to US," AP, New York, 17 November 2003; for 
details see www.usdol.gov , 17 November 2003: "Yemeni Cleric Assistant Convicted of 



Terror-Funding Charges, " http://edition.cnn/2005/LAW/03/10/Yemeni. cleric. terrorism/1 1 
March 2005. 



[543] M. Trevelyan, "Germany Probes Islamist Backers, Saudi Link Cited," Reuters, 
Berlin, 17 May 2004. 



[544] M. Trevelyan, "Muslims Find Recognition Elusive in Catholic Italy," Reuters, Milan, 
26 June 2004. 



[545] P. Smucker, "Out of Honey Business, Bin Laden Still Profits, "Christian Science 
Monitor, 23 October 2001 . 



[546] D. Pallister, "Terrorist Material Found in Sarajevo Charity. "Guardian, 23 February 
2002. 



[547] "From the Office of Public Affairs, Press Release," US Department of the 
Treasury, Washington DC, 29 August 2002. 



[548] L. Vidino, "Italy's Fifth Column, " www. frontpaqemaq.com . 20 November 2003. 



[549] "Iraq: Italian Muslims, against the War and Terrorism," position paper, AGI, 
Rome, 23 April 2004. 



[550] See the works of Magdi Allam, Italian journalist of Coptic Christian (Egyptian) 
origin: Bin Laden in Italia: viaggio nelllslam radicale, Milan: Mondatori, 2002 and 
Kamikaze: Made in Europe, Milan: Mondatori, 2004. 



[551] United Nations Security Council, S/2003/1070, 2 December 2003; see p. 57 for 
wiring diagram of the "Nada and Nasreddin networks," and pp. 21-22 for additional 
information. 



[552] Ibid. 



[553] Kepel, "The Trail of Political Islam." 



[554] "Big Dominique and his Struggle against the Islamists, The Economist, 18-31 
December 2004, pp. 73-74; Imam Akbar Syed, "Geopolitics of Fundamentalism, "South- 
West Asia Revue, isaved@pratique.fr . 



[555] "Big Dominique." 



[556] B. Raman, "Al Qaeda's Clone." South Asia Analysis Group, paper no 729, 2 July 
2003. 



[557] Labeviere, Dollars for Terrorism, pp. 72-73; "French Courts Vindicate Islamic 
Relief," Islamic Relief homepage, suaaf@csv.warwick.ac.uk . Islamic Society, University 
of Warwick, United Kingdom. 



[558] D. E. Kaplan, "The Saudi Connection, "USNews & World Report, 15 December 
2003. 



[559] "Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic 
Base," US Senate Republican Policy Committee, Washington DC, 16 January 1997. 



[560] "Violent Attack on Muslim Charity in France," Islamic Human Rights Commission, 
France, 10 September 1997. 



[561] L. Bryant, "Mideast Conflict Mobilizes Jewish, Muslim Community in France," 
Voice of America, Paris, 8 August 2002. 



[562] O. Guitta, "France's Everlasting Love for the PLO,'T/?e American Thinker, 
www.americanthinker.com , 2 August 2004. 



[563] "Article 10,"Ayn Al Yaqeen, Saudi Arabia, 19 April 2002 



[564] C. Wyatt, "Europe: France 'Forming Ethnic Ghettoes,'" BBC News, 6 July 2004. 



[565] I. Johnson and D. Crawford, "A Saudi Group Spreads Extremism in 'Law' 
Seminars "Wall Street Journal, 15 April 2003. 



[566] Ibid 



[567] "Bin Laden's Terror Networks in Europe," Mackenzie Institute, Washington DC, 
www.mackenzieinstitute.com/default.htmli ; (see also footnote [191 ). The Mackenzie 
Institute study provides many Dutch sources for what one article has called "De 
Politieke Islam in Nederland": in Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst, Leidschendam, 1998, 
p. 11; see also R. Abela and K. Bessems, "Terreurfondsen in Nederland, "Trouw, 17 
October 2001, pp. 1, 13. 



[568] "Islam First Religion in Amsterdam," lslamOnline.net, 30 July 2002; "Islamic 
Charity Slams Freeze on Assets in Hague," lslamOnline.net, 5 June 2002. 



[569] "Islamic Hatred in Europe." Religious Freedom Coalition newsletter. Washington 
DC, March 2002. 



[570] "Another Political Murder,"T/?e Economist, 6-12 November 2004, pp. 51-52; 
"After Van Gogh/Tfte Economist, 13-19 November 2004, pp. 55-56; Los Angeles 
Times, 14 November 2004, p. A3; Van dam tot jihad. De diverse dreigingen van de 
radicale islam tegen de democratische rechtsorde, The Hague: Ministerie van 



Binnenladse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, 2004 



[571] On this and similar phenomena the US Department of State has issued an annual 
"International Religious Freedom Report" since 2001 that includes individual country 
chapters on the status of religious freedom worldwide. 



[572] A. Mullen, "Haddad Breaks his Silence, "Metro Times., Detroit, 17 March; A. 
Mullen, "The Terrors of Puptte, "Metro Times, Detroit, 24 March 2004. 



[573] L. Vidino, "Belgium Ought to Look Within," National Review Online, 
www.nationalreview.com , 25 June 2003. 



[574] Ibid. 



[575] A. Amory, "Islamofascism Rising in Holland. " www.frontpageMaq.com . 6 March 
2003. 



[576] M. Robinson, "Attorney Denies Muslim Charity's European Director Aided Osama 
bin Laden's Terror Network," AP, Chicago, 6 May 2002. 



[577] "Copenhagen Mosque Suspected of Terror Ties, "Copenhagen Post Online, 
www.cphpost.dk , 1 February 2003. 



[578] J. Klausen, "Rogue Imams, "Axess Magazine, 

www.axess.se/english/archive/2004/nr1/ . 



[579] "Who Really Wants to Stop Bin Laden?" Intelligence Newsletter, Indigo 
Publications, 16 March 2000. 



[580] J. M. Berger, "Al Qaeda-Linked Web Site: $10 Million a Month Needed for Taliban 
in 2001 , " www.intelwire.com , 8 August 2004. 



[581] See The Muslim News, muslimnews.co.uk , 15 April 1999 



[582] "Kashmiri Separatist Ayub Thakur Dies, " www. rediff.com . 10 March 2004. 



[583] "UK Assets of Islamic Charity Frozen. " www. rediff.com . 16 January 2002 



[584] H. Gibson, "Traitors or Martyrs?" Time, www.time.com/time/europe/ . 12 November 
2001. 



[585] M. Whine, "A Muhajiroun: The Portal for Britain's Suicide Terrorists," 
International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 21 May 2003. 



[586) V. MacQueen, "Britain's Indigenous Terror." www. fronlpagemaq.com . 5 May 2003 



[587] United Kingdom Charity Commission report, www.charitvcommission.qov.uk . 1 
July 2003. 



[588] "PDF File of Combating the Financing of Terrorism: A Report on UK Action," 
Foreword by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP and the 
Home Secretary, Rt. Hon. David Blunkett, www.hm-treasurv.qov.uk , October 2002. 



[589] D. Van Natta Jr. and L. Bergman, "Militant Imams under Scrutiny across 
Europe, "New York Times, 25 January 2005. 



[590] A list of all organizations and individuals whose assets have been frozen is 
available at the Bank of England website, www.bankofenqland.co.uk . 



[591] "Abu Hamza: Controversial Muslim Figure. " CNN. com . International Edition, 
London, 27 May 2004; "Radical Cleric in Britain Charged with Urging Murder of 
Non-Muslims," AP, London, 19 October 2004 



1 1 Islamic charities in North America 



[592] From a transcript of Steven Emerson's Jihad in America, a video presentation on 



television, 21 November 1994, p. 8 



[593] Personal experience of J. Millard Burr. 



[594] For a study of MSA on campus see E. Stakelbeck, www.frontpagemaQ.com , 23 
April 2003. 



[595] On MSA see Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, Oneonta, NY: Islamic 
Publications International, 2002. 



[596] An interesting anecdote concerning the personal importance of zakat in America 
can be found in A. M. Muhahid, "Where is Aisha Today? The Mother of Homeless in 
Chicago, " www.soundvision.com/info/poor/aisha. asp , August 2004. The website provides 
tips on zakat and its use. 



[597] Salam al-Marayati, "Muslim Charities and Religious 
Freedom, " www.mpac.org/NEWS/ , Los Angeles, 11 October 2002. 



[598] D. McManus, "FBI Steps up its Scrutiny of Hamas Backers, "Los Angeles Tunes, 
2 February 1993. 



[599] D. Horowitz, "How the Left Undermined America's Security before 
9/1 1 ." www. frontpagemag.com , 24 March 2004. 



[600] Al-Marayati, "Muslim Charities 



[601] D. Sanger, and J. Miller, "Bush Freezes Assets of Biggest US Muslim 
Charity, "New York Times, 5 December 2001; 9/11 Report: Joint Congressional Inquiry, 
24 July 2003, www. news.findlaw.com/ndoes/dots/91 1 /rpt/ . 



[602] A. Knight, "Meet your Muslim Neighbor,"San Diego News Notes, May 2002 



[603] A full description of the founding and operations of BIF can be found in chapter 
2_, "Saudi Arabia and its Islamic charities," and the activities of GRF in chapter 10 . 
"The Muslim invasion of Europe." The sections here pertain specifically to their activities 
in the USA. 



[604] M. Levitt, "Combating Terrorist Financing, Despite the Saudis, "PolicyWatch, no. 
673, Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1 November 2002. 



[605] "Treasury Designates Benevolence International Foundation and Related Entities 
as Financiers of Terrorism," Office of Public Affairs, Department of the Treasury, 19 
November 2002; Foreign terrorist organizations can be found on the State Department 
website: www.state.aov/documents/orqanizations . 



[606] "Head of Charity Imprisoned for Diverting Funds to Militants, "Washington Times, 
19 August 2003. 



[607] "Leader of Muslim Charity in US is Said to Have Been Deported," Reuters. 16 
July 2003. 



[608] S. Schmidt, "Reporters' Files Subpoenaed, "Washington Post, 10 September 
2004. 



[609] Andre Martin and Michael J. Berens, "Terrorists Evolved in US "Chicago Tribune, 
11 December 2001. 



[610] R. Ehrenfeld, "Doing Business with Terrorists, " www.frontpaQemaQ.com , 21 
September 2004. 



[611] C. McKerney, "Palestinian Activist from Sunrise Charged with Perjury, 
Obstruction of Justice, "South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, 5 March 2004. 



[612] S. Wheeler, "Alleged Terror Threat Operates in DC Suburb, " CNSNews.com . 12 
July 2004. 



[613] "Money Freeze a Long Time Coming," CBS News, New York, 5 December 2001 



[614] S. McGonigle, "Memo Outlines Links to Hamas, "Dallas Morning News, 6 



December 2001 



[615] Jihad in America, an award-winning documentary, was first broadcast on 21 
November 1964; See S. Emerson, "Jihad in America: Part 
[|." www.blessedcause.orq/Patriot%20Progress/Steve%20Emerson%202.htm . 2002; S. 
Emerson and C. D. Sesto, Terrorist, New York: Villard Books, 1991. 



[616] The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (pamphlet), New York: Anti 
Defamation League, 2001 . 



[617] J. Miller, "Israel Says that a Prisoner's Tale Links Arabs in US to Terrorism, "New 
York Times, 17 February 1993. 



[618] "Hamas: Iranian Funding Reports 'lncorrect,"'fi//sf/V? Al Muslimah (in Arabic), 
London, February 1993, pp. 16-17. 



[619] "More Alleged Hamas Operatives Linked to DC-Area Think Tank." CNSNews.corn . 
www.townhall.com/news/politics . 26 August 2004. 



[620] S. Hettena, "FBI Links California Islamic Charity to Hamas, "North Coast Times, 
San Diego, California, 7 December 2001. 



[621] Anonymous [Rita Katz], Terrorist Hunter, New York: HarperCollins, 2003 



[622] "Money Freeze a Long Time Coming." 



[623] G. Simpson, "Holy Land Foundation Allegedly Mixed Charity Money with Funds 
for Bombers," Wa// Street Journal, 27 February 2002. 



[624] L. Auster, "The Clintons, Abdurahman Alamoudi and the Myth of 'Moderate' 
Islam, " NewsMax.com . 6 November 2000; F. Gaffney, "A Troubling 
Influence, " www.frontpaaemag.com . 9 December 2003 



[625] Simpson, "Holy Land Foundation." 



[626] P. Bedard, "Washington Whispers "USNe\vs& World Report, 6 February 2002 



[627] C. Limbacher, "Clinton Protected Terrorist Charity from FBI Shutdown, "Newsmax, 
6 February 2002. 



[628] Joseph DAgostino, "7000 Men Recently Entered from Al Qaeda 'Watch' 
Countries, "Human Events, 17 December 2001, p. 6. 



[629] R. Mank, "Feeding the Children of 'Martyrs. '" www.Salon.com . 1 1 July 2000. 



[630] J. Miller, "US Contends Muslim Charity is Tied to Hamas, "New York Times, 25 
August 2000. 



[631] Mike Allen and Steven Mufson, "US Seizes Assets of Three Islamic Groups: US 
Charity Among Institutions Accused of Funding HAMAS, "Washington Post, 5 December 
2001. 



[632] "Senior Leader of HAMAS and Texas Computer Company Indicted for 
Conspiracy," US Department of Justice press release, Washington DC, 18 December 
2002. 



[633] In 1980 President Carter used lEEPAto block Iranian assets in the USA. See US 
Code, Title 50: War and National Defense, Chapter 35: International Emergency 
Economic Powers. 



[634] Eric Lichtblau, "Jailed Islamic Charity Figures Accused of Funding Terrorists, "New 
York Times, 28 July 2004, p. A3. 



[635] D. Pipes, "Canada's First Family of Terrorism, "AmencanDaily, 
www.ameircandaily.com/article/630 . 17 March 2004. 



[636] "Canadian Admits al-Qaida Link. " http://cnews.canoe.ca . 4 March 2004. 



[637] Lamar Smith, "Hearing on Terrorist Threats to the United States/' Subcommittee 
on Immigration and Claims, House Committee on the Judiciary, Washington DC, 25 
January 2000. 



[638] "Qutbi Al Mahdi (Sudan/Canada), "Indian Ocean Newsletter, 28 November 1998 



[639] M. Jimenez, "Canada Investigates Sudanese Official Passport Use 
Probed, "National Post, 25 November 1998. 



[640] G. Dimmock, "Sudan Aiding Bin Laden: CSIS: Used Embassy Staff to Raise 
Funds, Provide Credentials, Brief Says, "National Post, 28 September 2001 . 



[641] S. Bell, "Ottawa Pulls Saudi Group's Charity Status. Muslim World League Being 
Sued by 9/11 Families, "National Post, 1 December 2003 



[642] Irshad Manji, The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-up Call for Honesty and Change, 
Mississauga, Ontario: Random House of Canada, 2003. 



[643] M. Elmasry, "Islam Needs No Defense against Manji's Book, but Perhaps Muslims 
Do "The Ottawa Muslim, www.ottawamuslim.net . 5 October 2003. 



[644] "A Pro-Terrorist Rally at Ohio State?" www. frontpaqernag.com . 7 November 2003. 



[645] Elaine Silvestrini,"al-Arian Wiretap Captured Poem of Hate for America, "Tampa 
Tribune, 2 August 2005. 



[646] E. Boefilert, "Is Sami al-Arian Guilty of Terrorist Plots?" Salon.com , 21 February 
2003; S. Shields, "Sami al-Arian and the Dungeon: A Fable for our TimeTCommon 
Dreams News Center, CommonDreams.org , 16 November 2003. 



[647] J. Seper, "Clinton White House Axed Terror-Fund Probe, "Washington Times, 2 
April 2002: "Head of U. S. Muslim Charity Indicted," Reuters, 9 October 2002. 



[648] Steve Emerson was the first to focus on SAAR and the 555 Grove Street 
connection. See S. Emerson, American Jihad: Terrorists Among Us, New York: Free 
Press, 2002. 



[649] "All Forms of Suppression Rejected: Firm Support for Uprising, "Kuwait Times, 6 
November 2000. 



[650] J. Miller, "Raids Seek Evidence of Money-Laundering, "New York Times, 21 March 
2002. 



[651] Anonymous [Kate], Terrorist Hunter, pp. 280-294. Ironically, many Muslim 
expatriates and J. Millard Burr, the co-author, tried as early as 1993 to interest 
authorities in the happenings in Herndon, Virginia. The super-secret and ineffectual 
Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) personnel of the FBI may have been collecting 
information, but nothing has ever been published about their activities. 



[652] M. Burgess, "The Trouble with Guantanamo," Position paper, Center for Defense 
Information, 24 October 2003. 



[653] S. Schwartz, "Saudis Actively Sponsoring Terrorism, "Weekly Standard., 8 April 
2002. 



[654] For a US government report on Safa holdings, see 
www.usdoi.aov/usao/vae/ArchivePress/OctoberPDFArchive/03/safaattachc102003.pdf. 



[655] J. Seper, "NJ Firm Backed Terrorists Linked to Hamas, al Qaeda," Washington 
Times, 29 March 2004. 



[656] M Epstein and B. Schmidt, "Operation Support-System Shutdown," National 
Review Online, www.nationalreview.com , 4 September 2003. 



[657] D. Farah, "Terror Probe Points to Va. Muslims, "Washington Post, 18 October 
2003. 



[658] On US government findings, see 

www.usdoi.aov/usao/vae/ArchivePress/OctoberPDFArchive/03/safaattache102003.pdf . 



Attachment E 



[659] S. Schwartz, "Wahhabis in the Old Dominion "Weekly Standard, 8 April 2002. 



[660] D. Farah and J. Mintz, "US Trails Va. Muslim Money, Ttes,"Washington Post, 7 
October 2002. 



[661] "Lawyers Seek to Freeze Saudi Assets in US.' www.arabnews.com . 
Jidda/Washington, 30 August 2002. 



[662] L. Kellman, "More than 600 Sept 11 Victims' Families Sue Saudis, Banks," AP, 15 
August 2002 



[663] A. Alexiev, "The End of an Alliance: It's Time to Tell the House of Saud 
Goodbye, "National Review, 28 October 2002. 



[664] A. Alexiev, "Confronting Saudi Lies, Extremism and Subversion for the Benefit of 
All," Position paper, United States Committee for a Free Lebanon, 21 November 2002. 



[665] Daniel Pipes, "Protecting Muslims while Rooting out Islamists, "Daily Telegraph, 
London, 14 September 2001 



12 Conclusion 



[666] Rachel Ehrenfeld. Saudi Dollars and Jihad, FrontPaaeMagazine.com . 24 October 
2005. 



[667] Amir Taheri, "Losing Battle for Islamists, "Arab News, 26 March 2005 



[668] Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle 1, 303. 



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